The Critical Customer — Next level stakeholder insights

By Johanna Hallin & Evelina Fredriksson

Capturing knowledge carried by individuals, especially when the stakeholder map is complex, is the most beneficial way to inform decision-making in a new way.

The most challenging part of this is to capture that which is said far away from the boardrooms. These dialogues require more from the person conducting them, but they will bring more unique value in return. Individuals representing stakeholder groups without formal influence over the company’s decisions have no interest in preserving existing structures, so they will challenge, develop and expand your knowledge.

Since January 2014, Lumen Behavior has engaged in extensive dialogue with our clients’ stakeholders. These represent customers in both specific and general terms, and aggregated they lead us to the most fascinating insights on customers’ expectations of future business.

Customer insights

Based on the thousands of dialogues we had with our clients’ customers, we have been able to identify recurring patterns and themes. Talking to stakeholders about topics relevant to them provides important information about the market and shines new light on decision-making. Each dialogue was conducted according to the person’s age, situation and cognitive ability.

Real answers are found in real conversations.

The customer wants to be heard with empathy and engage in meaningful conversations. Businesses that master empathy will succeed and gain useful information from these conversations. Understanding the customer’s reality and what is truly relevant to her is key. It is no longer possible to divide customers into generic categories (segments) based on age, gender and place of residence. Instead, customers ask for individualization, and to be asked questions that inspire real conversation.

The critical customer is your friend.

Expressing dissatisfaction is a way of showing commitment by investing in improvements. A customer willing to criticize and offer feedback to a business is a precious asset. She is helping you to learn and develop. A business that responds with creativity and solves the problem inspires loyalty and trust.

Trust is built by those brave enough to enter into conversation.

To stand tall when the customer addresses the uncomfortable issues builds strong relationships. The customer does not expect that nothing will ever go wrong, but she will be impressed when problems are solved and her considerations inform decision-making.

It’s okey to misstep from time to time.

The customer is not interested in “right” and “best.” She cares about willingness to innovate and iterate in order to solve problems. When things go wrong, the values are tested, and how the company responds makes a strong impression.

Leveraging Human Knowledge — How does it work?

The starting point is that every individual is entitled and has a unique value as a human being — at the same time, everyone is also part of a structure.

To create change, we can draw strength from people’s subjective reality, and from their experiences and stories. In order to move forward, we need to understand the frameworks and context surrounding those personal narratives. To emphatically take in the testimony of an individual, and to understand the system at the same time, is a powerful way of working with stakeholder dialogues.

This way of looking at stakeholders — as individuals and as parts of a bigger system — also brings challenges. The interests of stakeholders are not always aligned. Sometimes they are in grave conflict.

So what to do? We need a solid understanding of the stakeholders — who they are, and how they are prioritized. A well-conducted stakeholder mapping is essential to leveraging knowledge from new sources — but in order to bring that additional value that will make a company an Inter Business company, we also need to consider all the prioritized stakeholders at once, even if they have different opinions.

This means that the only way to succeed is to create value for one stakeholder that also generates value for another stakeholder. And never be satisfied with flippant trade-offs; never compromise core values. Value that is created for one stakeholder at the expense of another will be costly for the business. Instead of looking at each group separately, we need to see the system. In order to not lose track of the knowledge generated by the dialogues, we need to apply the principle of empathy in each meeting.

This is an excerpt from the first iteration of the Inter Business Index of 2016, ranking the 10 frontrunners in business beyond sustainability. Based on published research, the Inter Business Index uses a unique tool, Ibx Insight™, developed to measure and analyze the core skills that indicate a company’s’ ability to create holistic value.

Download full report of 2017 and find out which Swedish corporations are the frontrunners in business beyond sustainability — the ones that have the ability to lead with the skills needed to create value in multiple dimensions.

The Inter Business framework is built on extensive qualitative research, resulting in not only the Index itself, but also a sound methodology for the framework that have been published in Journal of Management and Sustainability and European Social Innovations Review.

The Inter Business Index is presented by us, Inter Business Initiative, and Ibx, who offers tools to measure and manage, as well as insights on, business beyond sustainability.