Over the last several weeks, I’ve been sharing insights on co-creation. First, I explained that co-creation is already happening within your customer relationships, and has been for years. Then I talked about how you can create a co-creation culture, and finally presented evidence that co-creation is indeed for B2B. Now the next question is how you get started once you understand that your customers are co-creating and you’ve decided to jump in with them.
A good starting point is to investigate where your partners and customers are already engaged in co-creation. Finding where this is happening will allow you to observe what is and is not working. The investigative techniques used by Summa’s Human-Centered Design Practice often make visible co-creation activities and user-fashioned tools to help B2B partners get "jobs" done that are not yet known to the company. The tools, processes and data found can be analyzed and inform decisions about supporting it with a customer engagement solution that uses software to capture inputs, generate insights and suggest actions.
This investigation will also help answer the next critical questions: Who will own the co-creation process? Will you be joining partners and customers in the places they already co-create, or will you be creating and owning channels that facilitate the co-creation process?
If a B2B company wants to own and direct more of the process, a good first step is to open channels of co-creation with their partners. Most commonly this is done through partner communities that provide continuous, two-way value exchanges. A company may provide partners with easy access to product knowledge, collaboration or quote to order capabilities. In return, partners will begin to provide insights that lead to co-creation. Building these partner communities was a major IT undertaking just a few years ago. Today they can quickly be live through platforms like Salesforce’s Community Cloud. The complexity of these communities often lies in owning the experience and driving user adoption through exchanges of value between partners and an organization, rather than the technical plumbing where complexity used to be found.
In our work with the United Way and many of their local branches, we were often in the middle of facilitating email conversations between constituents from various branches. Other times, the branches would communicate with each other via email and inadvertently not include our team. They would forward email chains that were a few weeks old to catch someone up on a conversation. We all know how this works, or more precisely how it doesn’t work, to share ideas amongst large groups.
The United Way of Allegheny County asked Summa for help in bringing these co-creation conversations to a place where all locals and the nationwide organization could quickly benefit, as well as being able to search for old conversations, share files, and vote on ideas. Through the power of the Salesforce Communities platform, a Community was created and in a few weeks constituents from the largest to the smallest local United Ways were collaborating quickly around ideas that are truly changing their paths forward. These conversations are all centered around co-creation of solutions, campaigns, ideas and initiatives. Yes, these conversations were already happening before the Community existed, but they were happening in silos invisible to many of the people who could benefit most from them. Removing the complexity of collaboration allowed those with the brightest ideas to collaborate with less friction. The United Way recognized the already ongoing co-creation, and focused on creating a channel to increase the velocity of the process.
Once value is established and partner adoption is high, the company can begin to become more explicit in its calls for partner involvement in the co-creation process. Highlighting successes in this community and possibly publicly continues to return value to the contributing partners and builds stronger relationships.
One thing to always remember is that co-creation is already happening amongst your employees, partners and customers. This means opportunity is already present. Getting started can be as simple as finding this ongoing co-creation, deciding who should own the process and taking short, quick steps as you release small sets of functionality in shorter development cycles. Learn with each small iteration of developing your Community, listening to partner users’ feedback each time. Releasing smaller sets of functionality quickly will make changes consumable, help eliminate the need for training and increase adoption. Releasing functionality in your Community in this agile fashion means you are actually co-creating your co-creation process, and will be your first return on the investment.
