Enhancing customer centricity in New Service Development in a business to business context

Abstract

his master thesis is the outcome of a journey into the New Service Development (NSD) practices of large organizations involved in business to business (B2B)  innovation. The scope of the project is to generate new knowledge on the challenges that organizations face to engage business customers into their internal innovation processes. Research shows that, in B2B settings, customer involvement is one of the critical success factors for meaningful service innovation. Structuring such engagements bring to less uncertain results.
In collaboration with the Innovation Labs of ING Bank, the project applies a service-centred design approach to understand the barriers for smooth customer involvement in innovation, defining a new process to structure the early stages of development taking into account the experiences of the stakeholders involved. Different research activities were conducted within the case study in collaboration with innovators, service designers, and front office professionals to explore the problem areas and define the most important challenges as experienced by professionals working on new service development in the context of B2B corporate finance. The research, both in literature and in the case study, has provided a picture of the intrinsic complexity of these processes, especially in the fuzzy front end, which is usually experimental, chaotic, difficult to plan and unpredictable. The challenges highlighted from the research are linked to a current barrier present between innovation Labs and the front office department of the bank, which is the one directly involved in customer-facing activities. This barrier prevents the smooth involvement of customers in new service development practices. Focusing on the challenges and using an iterative design approach, I have developed a new process and the tools needed to structure collaboration between the front office department and the innovation Labs to ultimately support customer-centricity in the fuzzy front end of innovation.The concept proposed specifically focuses on the role of Relationship Managers as key elements to facilitate and sensitize clients on collaborative solution development. By creating a new way of working based on trust and transparency, relationship managers will be enabled to have a proactive approach towards innovation, supporting internal projects in reaching out to the bank’s clients base for co-creation. The final proposal is centred on three main points: Providing a structure and a way of working to facilitate collaboration between the innovation Labs and colleagues working in the front office with client-facing roles.Providing tools to support the new role of RMs as a facilitator of innovation practices and mediator between customers and initiatives. Providing a customer-centric approach to solution ideation that focuses on real contextual understanding of the client’s problems to define solutions that bring real value to customers. The tools presented in the process have been tested with front office professionals in the case study through digital prototype testing.The results of the test show that the introduction of a common way of working between innovation and the front office department will greatly enhance trust in the innovation process and collaboration between the two areas of the organization.