Taking Action

Most new product development is done by guessing what customers want, then surveying them at the end to confirm. Customer co-creation flips that. After 18 months working with a financial services client that ran an online conversational community alongside focus groups, here are four ways to involve customers in NPD that lower risk and lift relevance.

Customer-delight programs feel right and are nearly impossible to make repeatable. The HBR research "Stop trying to delight your customers" puts a number on it: making business easy beats delighting at building loyalty. Here's what that research actually found, why Transactional NPS beats Customer Effort Score for capturing the same signal, and how to run the survey at scale without drowning.