Businesses conduct extensive research to measure how the experience they offer measures up to the experience offered by competitors. This research is valuable, but there is a way to quickly identify opportunities for differentiation and innovation much more efficiently.
A more efficient way is for competiors to share CX insights. Most competitors face similar CX issues, and as the saying goes a problem shared is a problem halved. Collaborating on these issues is innovative, customer-centric, cost effective and synergistic.
Synergies have been central to business strategy for a long time; the notion of 2+2 adding up to 5 is very attractive and has been the basis for many mergers. When looked at intially, collaborating on CX issues may sound like a leap of faith fraught with danger, but I believe that businesses should focus more on growing market opportunities, instead of eliminating each other. What I would regard to be a much bigger leap of faith for businesses is to go into a merger with a competitor at the cost of share value, which 66% of big mergers are said to reduce.
Bain & Company outline the benefits of collaboration with customers, vendors and competitors as: “lower-costs, and higher-quality ideas from the best sources in the world”. Accenture say on their web-site that “high-performing organizations recognize that continuous learning and collaboration helps them transcend survival and be at the forefront of change”, while a recent study commissioned by Google has shown that collaboration is proven to have a strong corollary with innovation (.81)
Collaboration should be conducted where there are predefined rules about what can and can’t be shared. With the heightened insight gained, businesses can then focus their own resources where they have clearly differentiated competitive advantage, and look to seek out market opportunities.
I am not suggesting that businesses tell each other valuable secrets, but rather, share issues that are arising in the context of customer experience management and the types of approach taken to address them. By helping each other out, collaborating competitors will gain insights unimaginable to non-collaborating competitors. By sharing these issues, businesses will help improve the experience offered to customers, and guess what impact this will have on their bottom line?
