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Chip Bell Gets Inside Your Customer’s Imagination

5 Secrets for Creating Breakthrough Products, Services, and Solutions

4 min readSep 6, 2020

I’ve known Chip Bell for a very long time. Chip is one of America’s top consultants, trainers, and speakers on customer service and leadership. The author or co-author of more than 20 books, Bell has worked with Ritz-Carlton, GE, Microsoft, State Farm, Harley-Davidson, and many other companies.

Chip has a new book titled, Inside Your Customer’s Imagination. Using examples from organizations like McDonald’s, DHL, Marriott, Lockheed Martin, Discover Financial, Ultimate Software, and many more, Bell shows how co-creation partnerships enable you to tap into the treasure trove of ideas, ingenuity, and genius-in-the-raw within every customer.

Here’s a Q&A with Chip where he talks about why he wrote Inside Your Customer’s Imagination and what the book is all about.

What inspired you to write Inside Your Customer’s Imagination?

Partnership is a form of relationship that heightens loyalty and longevity. Most organizations would rather have a customer for life, than a transient one. Partnership also is an alliance for collaborative (co-laboring) work, not just “on your behalf” work. I believe the customer is an untapped resource for ideas and inspiration that can result in breakthroughs. However, imagination is inside the customer accessed by a door opened only from the inside. The quality of the relationship (a.k.a. partnership) with the customer is the key to getting them to open the door to their gifts in a fashion that marries their needs and aspirations with the organization’s capacities and resources. I was intrigued by the features of a highly innovative company (think Google, Apple, Pixar, etc.) and believed they might be relevant for customer co-creation partnerships. My goal was to crack the code on how to make those features work in a way that gave readers new insights and skills.

What is a co-creation partnership?

When companies attempt to create new products or services, they often miss the innovation mark and do so with a factory mentality. This leaves the customer under-WOWed. On the other hand, if you include your customer in the creation of products, services, and solutions, you’re meeting them at a need-offering junction where they can participate in fulfilling their needs and wants. You’re using curiosity to build trust. Co-creation partnerships have common goals and mutual values but bring to the table different talents and resources. It’s the best of both worlds and a win-win for service providers and customers alike.

Why is innovative service important today?

Today’s customers, with their inclination toward elevating their expectations every time a service provider adds more, have almost run the delivery of service delight straight into the too-pricey zone. Each time a service provider adds more in their effort to exceed customer expectations, it comes closer to completely eliminating profit margins already razor-thin for most.

Why doesn’t everyone deliver innovative service if it’s so important to customers today?

The reasons are many, some complex. Innovative service suggests a bit of ingenuity and imagination. Too often, employees are told to “just get the job done.” It can be hard to be creative if you are rewarded for task completion. Secondly, we have put so much emphasis on standardized and uniform (important to product making), it is hard to focus on being novel and unique. Third, organizations have focused too much on mechanizing service that can strip out the emotional connection. Airline upgrades are now done by the computer, not by the gate attendant. Personalized service is becoming as rare as an elevator operator!

If more companies embraced the idea of a co-creation partnership, what changes would you expect to see in the customer service landscape?

We would see a lot more innovation — products and services that truly inspire, meeting the customers’ needs as well as building brand loyalty. The surprise and delight factor would increase, and the impact on your customers would be truly amazing. Co-creation partnerships create a bond that emerges from risking together, being authentic and vulnerable together, and solving or inventing together. It is a microcosm of interpersonal relationships at their finest, a model for the best of democracy in action. It starts with the courageous act to more passionately connect. That, in itself, is a refreshing concept in this fast-paced, go-go-go world we now live in.

What is the key takeaway from this book for frontline service providers?

Each and every customer has the ability to tap into their creativity, which is a treasure trove of opportunity for service providers and for the customer. This idea of co-creation partnership is where innovation lies, but it will require building trust and establishing repertoire with your current customers as well as those who are new. Co-creation partnerships offer breakthrough products, services, and solutions to effectively compete in today’s innovation-hungry economy, which is becoming increasingly challenging for service providers in our complex economy.

Peter Economy
Peter Economy

Written by Peter Economy

Peter Economy is a Wall Street Journal best-selling business author and ghostwriter with more than 100 books to his credit (and more than 3 million copies sold)

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