Selecting a new health insurance plan has been on my ‘to do list’ for a couple of weeks. I was not looking forward to this task, as I was expecting my only choice was between marginal differences in monthly payments and reimbursements.  However, when I finally got to it, I was highly surprised! Not only could I choose from monthly payment options, but I could also choose between various levels of service defined per insurance package.

It seems that a majority of Dutch health care insurance companies have picked up a strategy that is called delivering a ‘Differentiated Service Experience’.  Insurance companies are now offering different service levels per insurance package. They range from a more basic package, where all requests have to be handled online, to extended packages where full support from a call centre is provided.

Accenture believes delivering a ‘Differentiated Service Experience’ will become a major trend this year. Our belief stems from research conducted among 2900 US consumers which established a link between an increase in customer retention, reduction in support cost, and growth in the customer base by providing a differentiated service experience incorporating control and choice by the customer. As customer’s needs are rising and becoming more diverse, companies can no longer offer a one size fits all service experience that meets the needs of all customers while controlling costs.

By offering different service experiences, the diverse needs and expectations of customer segments can be met. For instance, customers vary in the extent to which they prefer self-service. Different service levels can cover multiple degrees of self-service. A differentiated service strategy also allows for providing service through the channel that is preferred per customer segment. Our research confirms consumer receptivity towards differentiated service experiences: 82% of all consumers appreciate if they can customize their service experience.

Controlling costs is the another benefit of delivering a ‘Differentiated Service Experience’.  The costs of providing certain customers higher service levels are being compensated either by the higher price the customer is willing to pay, or the higher life time value the customer has.  Further, the research shows that consumers are far more receptive to differentiated service if they feel they are empowered to control their service choices even if their choice comes at a cost. In general, consumers prefer incentives for choosing a lower cost service and they don’t want to be charged more for better service.  The previous mentioned health insurance package are examples of cost controls and customer control and choice.

My positive experience with ‘choice and control’ when arranging my health insurance has left me with hope that I can soon customize my service experience for other products and services such as banking and energy.

Read more on Accenture’s research and insights on ‘Differentiated Service Experience’ in our recent point of view.

Federal Chancellor of Germany Angela Merkel opened the event in Davos with emphasizing the urge for Europe to regain global trust and compete effectively on the world stage by reduce state debt and creating harmoniously functioning political structures. As she stated: “What we don’t want is that we promise something that we can’t deliver”. If there’s one word that sums up the mood at the WEF this week, it’s uncertainty.

In below video Accenture Executive Chairman ‘William D. Green’ discussed insights from several panel discussions on how technology drives growth and opportunity and on the importance of building talent and competitiveness.

Growth in Emerging Markets
One of the most discussed topics this year was the search for growth in emerging high-growth markets. The search for growth opportunities in emerging economies is no longer a matter of choice; it has become a necessity. In the current global economic environment many companies are renewing their interest in emerging economies as a springboard for their next phase of growth. The landscape of high growth consumer markets is changing fast. Household incomes in emerging economies will jump by more than US$8.5 trillion between 2010 and 2020—nearly 60 percent of the global increase over this period. As these incomes grow, so will consumption and demand.

During the event Accenture published it’s new research Fast forward to Growth involving the opinions of almost 600 executives from both emerging and mature economies. This research shows that although the vast majority of business leaders are focused on emerging markets to provide growth, forty percent of executives are not confident that their organizations possess the capabilities to fully grasp opportunities in emerging economies or believe their companies must accelerate their efforts to build share in these markets.

For the past 16 years, Accenture has worked closely with the World Economic Forum and the other strategic partner organizations to advance the Forum’s goal of driving positive change and improving the state of the world. Please visit Accenture Davos 2012: The Inside Story for more researches published during Davos 2012.

The truth is of course that all of these play a role in successful innovation. And even these don’t give you a full picture of what is needed for continuous successful innovation. But is there one element that is so crucial that without it successful innovation would be impossible?

It’s pretty much agreed among innovation specialists that any real innovation has to be based on understanding customer challenges. After all, a truly innovative product or service introduces new benefits that offer a superior way to solve your customers’ challenges. And if this solution is fundamentally new and so much better than the current market offering, it can even become a game-changer, just as Amazon reinvented book-selling, and Southwest changed the airline game with their low-cost, no-frill offerings.

Successful innovations help solve challenge customers face in their daily life and the current compromises they have to make in fulfilling their needs with inadequate existing solutions. This can even be needs customers may not even be fully aware of: the so-called unarticulated needs. The key to this is in-depth customer insight. You need  a fresh understanding of your clients and the notso-obvious challenges they face to give you a competitive advantage. As Henry Ford famously said: “if I’d asked my customers what they needed, they’d have replied ‘a faster horse”. Ford recognized that their real need was getting from A to B more quickly, their compromise was using a not fast-enough horse. They simply could not imagine a totally new and better solution at that time.

In other words, consumers don’t or can’t always see the full potential of new technologies. They can imagine incremental improvements to what they have (a faster horse), but they can’t usually imagine something entirely different that solves their problems in a totally different way (a car, or an airplane), even though it would be orders of magnitude better. A company that is aware of the challenges their customers face and understand the future potential of new technologies, can come up with the right innovative solutions to those challenges . Their own model T-Ford, so to speak.

So the ultimate question companies should be asking is: “How can I solve this customer’s challenge better than my competitors?”

Again, to do that you really have to understand your customers and proximity is key to understanding your customers This is a lot easier for a company like Apple, as its employees are its own most discerning customers. But it’s a lot harder for, say, a financial services company. Of course, their employees also buy financial products, but that doesn’t mean they understand the challenges faced by specific target groups, such as doctors or entrepreneurs. One global electronics group has taken this particular bull by the horns and organizes ‘consumer safaris’ for its employees, where marketing and R&D people spend time in its customers’ homes. There they observe the actual challenges that their customers face on a daily basis to uncover opportunities for innovations that really do matter.

Combining customer insights you gain from such safaris with deep technological insight, gives you a powerful innovation driver. Certainly if you master to understand how current and emerging technology can be applied to meet future needs. That is industry foresight, the ability to foresee or prepare consciously for the future. You have to ask and be able to answer the questions “where is our industry going and how can we solve our customers’ current and future challenges”.

And this is where smart commercialization and speed to market become very important. The better the product and the more quickly you can launch it, the greater the lead you will have on your competitors and the longer you’ll be able to dominate the market. Or rather: timing to market is a crucial capability. After all, if you’re launching a new range of ice creams, it’s probably best not to do this in the winter. Just as you need to determine when customers will be ready to embrace a new technology (tablets anyone?).

The most successful innovative companies do this repeatedly, which is only possible because they have indeed embedded innovation in their organization, or systemized innovation.

This requires a comprehensive  innovation operating model such as Accenture’s Innovation Engine, which we specifically designed for our clients to systematically identify, develop and select more valuable innovation projects and scale these faster with a higher rate of success. We believe that systemizing innovation means embedding a customer-centric innovation and culture and process that enables first time right and fast. These processes will push out successful innovation with a higher degree of predictability and a higher correlation between input (R&D budget, investments) and output (demand-led profit growth).  In other words, it helps companies to come up with better solutions to real customer challenges, not on a random basis, but consistently and continuously.

So in short, innovation is about identifying your target audience and growth markets, combining customer insights and market foresight to come up with game-changing innovations that meet your customers’ ultimate needs. Only if you have systemized innovation in your organisation, you will consistently and profitably help and excite your customers again and again.

Join the discussion on the key ingredients for successful innovation here: http://linkd.in/AeRrk4

This week Accenture published its Technology Vision 2012, an annual outlook of the most important emerging technology trends that are predicted to have a critical impact on businesses; a distillation from the experiences of our research teams and the input of our clients. The emerging technology trends are outlined so forward-thinking CIOs will use these to position their organizations to drive growth and high performance, rather than just focusing on cost-cutting and efficiency improvements.

Technology Vision 2012
In Technology Vision 2012 Accenture identifies context-based services as one of six key trends, predicting that a surge in context-based services is imminent. This is enabled by the convergence of and easy access to many sources of contextual information, including soaring smartphone usage, the expansion of cloud computing, an explosion of social media participation, and the development of powerful tools for aggregating and analyzing multiple forms of data.

CIOs and other IT leaders who have started to leverage contextual data to build a deeper understanding of consumer preferences and habits are establishing themselves as strategic players within their companies. They are teaming more effectively with functions such as sales and marketing and leveraging contextual services to drive new revenue and deliver more value for their businesses. It will be the CIO’s job to frame for the C-suite the opportunity of contextual services—pushing the executives to “dream bigger” and identifying what new products and services are becoming possible as context becomes key.

Other trends
The other trends in the Accenture Technology Vision 2012 include:

• Converging Data Architectures: It is not just the rising volume of data that will challenge organizations, but rather developing new data architectures for effectively handling both structured and unstructured information.
• Industrialized Data Services: Related to the data architecture trend, the true value of data will be realized when it is shared freely. To do that, data is being decoupled from applications and no longer owned by a single business.
• Social-Driven IT: social media are becoming powerful catalysts that are changing the ways customers, employees and partners use technology to interact with the world around them. Most enterprises have yet to catch up to that reality and almost none take full advantage of it.
• PaaS-Enabled Agility: the report emphasizes the importance of the agility of the platform in concert with market viability and a focus on the complementary collection of business services also provided by the vendor. PaaS providers will increasingly offer three additional components: reusable business services, integration capabilities, and extension capabilities.
• Orchestrated Analytical Security: Companies are more “connected” than ever—not only through the Web and mobile devices, but through other non-traditional routes, most notably in the physical world. Think about how connected automobiles and industrial controls are to other systems. Consequently, the risks have increased and how organizations assess the risks is changing.

It is time to focus on technology as a driver for growth and take the bold decisions to move beyond IT’s legacy constraints—constraints that make it too difficult to change, too costly to pursue new opportunities. These trends raise some of the thorny questions about IT skills sets and IT organization structures that need attention now.

The recently published Accenture Technology Vision 2012 poses a challenge to all CIO’s and their IT departments: it is time that the conversations between CIOs and business colleagues should revolve around what the organization needs IT to do—not what IT can and cannot do. Technology and business enablement have become so interconnected that businesses can no longer afford to wait for IT to catch up. So IT departments need to decide which role they want to play and where needed embrace external innovations and capabilities to support the business.

Tomorrow marks the kick-off of the 42nd edition of the World Economic Forum (WEF) Annual Meeting which will take place January 25-29 in Davos, Switzerland under the theme The Great Transformation: Shaping New Models.

Over 2,600 top officials from leading private-sector companies, governments, nonprofit organizations and academic institutions will gather to discuss the increasingly complex, interdependent and fast-paced era we live in whereby leaders return to their core purpose of defining what the future should look like, aligning stakeholders around that vision and inspiring their institutions to realize that vision. Ahead of the event Accenture CEO Pierre Nanterme outlines 3 trends that are driving this global transformation.

Like last year, Accenture Chairman Bill Green was once again invited to share his vision and opinions and will moderate a panel session entitled A Smart Growth Solution that examines how technological advances drive economic growth and employment.

Accenture has an extensive program lined up for this week including the launch of a extensive research report from the Accenture Institute on High Performance on the importance of grasping opportunities in high-growth markets. Additionally, Accenture conducts year-round joint research with the World Economic Forum and this year was awarded a record number of four projects. During Davos, the project teams will share the latest results from these projects on the topics of Green Growth Partnerships, Driving Sustainable Consumption, New Energy Architecture and Supply Chain and Transport Risk.

I’ll discuss the key take-aways of this year’s WEF in my next post which will be published on Monday January 30. To read last year’s report, please read Mark Foster’s notes from Davos.

With the explosive growth of online, mobile and social media channels, customers choose their interaction channel of preference and demand a seamless multi-channel experience. To sustain high performance and growth through uncertain times, companies will need to work harder and smarter to find and capitalize on growth opportunities and to provide a great customer experience.

Some companies were preparing to take a rest over the Christmas holidays, but at Accenture these are always busy times. Renewing contracts, clients who send out RfP’s and a High Performance Marketing Conference (HPMC) that is approaching fast, all very energizing.

Last week I got an update from the HPMC team and was impressed with all the great client stories that they have identified and the speakers they have confirmed for the conference. One case that I am particularly interested in to hear more about is the case of Aviva, a large UK- based provider of life and pension products, which also has a strong position in Europe and other parts of the world.

James Henderson, head of Aviva’s UK Life & Pensions Customer Management will tell the story on how Accenture helped them better targeting their customers by gaining more customer insight through Analytics. Together with the client Accenture created a Customer Analytical Record (CAR) within 6 weeks. This CAR was used for creating several analytical models. The valuable insights that came from these models were used in campaigns.  This has allowed us to profile, segment and understand the customer base in a new way. We made  discoveries about Client’s customers such as second policy purchase behaviour, tenure and product holdings, average policy and product holdings, life stage and wealth stage segments.

Key results from the project; reduction of throughput time with up to 25% and an increase of conversion of 200%

The cool thing about this case is that the solution was made in a truly global way, by leveraging Accenture’s customer insight center in Milan, Indian analytics experts for the creation of the models and local management consultants from the UK who created actionable insights from the analysis. The models are hosted by Accenture and now available for Aviva as hosted or managed service.

On February 9th 2012, Accenture organizes the 7th High Performance Marketing Conference at the WTC in Amsterdam with the theme: “Creating Customer Value in a Cross Channel World”. Get up-to-date on the latest innovations in Marketing, Sales and CRM. Broaden your scope by attending presentations and break-out sessions on leading practices implemented at KLM, Canon, SAS, Aviva, Accenture and others.

Would you like to know how Aviva and Accenture realized this transformation, please register: http://www.accenture.com/Microsites/hpmc/forms/Pages/register.aspx

For 2012 I have selected three service themes which are going to monopolize the conversations both on the blog and on location with our clients.  In order of personal importance;

1. Digital, digital, digital: if only it was that simple.

This theme will discuss everything ranging from the internal challenges organizations face in keeping up with the pace of innovation (ex: smart phones to tablets to ?)  to the basics of connecting the internal lines to deliver a seamless cross-channel experience.  It is all easier said than done which is why we need to talk about it, share our experiences, and all grow wiser from it.

2. Customer Service 2.0:  I am patiently waiting for my Dutch ‘wow’ experience.

Before getting to the ‘wow’ experience we will take a step back and first address a few basics to re-ignite the discussion around customer centricity.  If the customer really is king why are customer service departments always located in the basement and possess the worlds’ worst coffee machines?  In today’s competitive economy organizations can protect and grow their market share by making an impact where no one else is.  Differientiate your business by delivering exceptional customer service; word will spread and customers will come.

3. Becoming social: inside and out.

In 2011 social media further developed and proved itself (once again) as not being a hype but a new way of interaction.  While previous years focused mainly on the individual consumer, 2011 expanded this focus to include B2B and to the internal employee.  This theme will explore and discuss all things social: how it changes the way we interact as consumers, as friends, as co-workers, and as business partners.  To stay in the game organizations need to broaden their communication styles and invest in new technologies to provide the needed applications, data analytics, and infrastructures to become ’social’.  As with customer service 2.0, becoming social is a theme which will separate the leaders from the pack.

Over the course of 2012 I will be sharing my thoughts with you on these three themes. I am hoping this year is full of interaction and challenging comments from you all….as it would provide the proof that themes 1 and 3 are alive and kicking in more than just my head.

Accenture’s 2012 survey of more than 10,000 consumers across 10 countries shows consumers are making their networked lives more robust. They are connecting in more than one way and on multiple devices, consuming more content, and doing it all on the go. Specifically, this research has identified 5 trends for manufacturers and service providers to consider as consumers strive to be always connected. Below I will discuss three trends of these trends in more detail.

Smart and Mobile
Consumers are adopting mobile technology so rapidly that the mobility trend is in hyperdrive. While consumers still have strong ownership and usage of desktop or laptop computers (90 percent own them), purchase intentions for computers are slowly declining. At the same time, smartphone and tablet PC ownership are rising steeply. In fact, in the past 12 months, the percentage point increase in smartphone and tablet PC purchases almost equals the purchase decrease of computers and mobile feature phones.

Intentions to purchase tablets in the next 12 months have doubled from last year—the largest relative gain among the 19 technologies surveyed. Interestingly, as consumers buy highly mobile tablets, they increasingly view their laptop PC as a more stationary device.

Through my years here in Holland I have met a few individuals on occasion as enthusiastic as myself; however, they all shared one similarity.  They didn’t believe there was a way to turn their dream into reality.  I was beginning to wonder if anyone here had read the book  ’Dromen, durven, doen’….?

Then one fall day in November 2010 I met a man, a man with a dream, and for the first time in many years I could see by the determination in his eyes that this man was determined to turn his dream into reality. This was the day I met Roy Scheerder (Vice President Marketing KLM Netherlands), a man with a dream and a desire to pursue it. KLM Netherlands and Accenture had been working together for many years and had shared many successes together as a result of a trusted partnership.  This long term relationship was a core reason why Roy Scheerder turned to Accenture to help him with his new challenge: turning his dream into a reality.

On February 9th Roy will be presenting his story of how KLM Customer Care Netherlands transitioned from a re-active to a pro-active customer service team.  A team that works together to deliver exceptional service to its’ customers, a team that works fact based and with predictive models to ensure they can adapt to unforeseen changes in volumes: a team that maximizes the effectiveness of the daily execution through clear communication and strong leadership.

“It’s about changing a non-critical process into a value-adding service for customer and commerce.“

– Roy Scheerder

Don’t miss this opportunity to hear Roy share his dream, and how together with his team, they found the passion and drive to turn the dream into reality.  Register today for the Accenture High Performance Marketing Conference:  http://www.accenture.com/Microsites/hpmc/Pages/index.aspx

Er is één fase van drie maanden geweest welke echter de meeste indruk heeft gemaakt: het wegvallen van m’n team waardoor de oplevering van innovatie aan verschillende ‘mission critical’ systemen in gevaar kwam.In een korte tijd verlieten twee collega’s het team waardoor al het werk van een systeem op mijn bord kwam te liggen. Dit lijkt misschien op het eerste gezicht vervelend, maar het is ook de kans om te laten zien wat je waard bent. In een korte tijd ben ik developer, tester en project manager in een geweest. Het heeft me wat overuren gekost, maar uiteindelijk was de klant zeer tevreden met het de (bijna) foutloze oplevering van de release. High performance, in zekere zin wel. Delivered? Zeker!

Nadat de zojuist genoemde periode was afgelopen ben ik doorgegaan naar de design afdeling. Hier lagen nog veel kansen voor verbetering. Samen met een aantal collega’s zijn nu alle fases, van ontwerp tot nazorg, sterk in kwaliteit verbeterd en het werpt z’n vruchten af: foutloze opleveringen, soms zelfs zo foutloos dat tijdens het testen amper iets gevonden wordt!

Het mooiste wat ik dit jaar heb geleerd is dat er bij Accenture ontzettend veel ruimte is om te groeien, dat je altijd op steun en hulp kan rekenen van je collega’s, dat er hard gewerkt word om het einddoel te behalen, dat er tijd is om leuke dingen te doen, dat je altijd beloond wordt voor het (harde) werken en dus de erkenning er zeker is, en zo kan ik nog wel even doorgaan!

Iedereen een fijne jaarwisseling toegewenst! Ik heb veel zin in de viering van de jaarwisseling, maar zeker ook in het komende jaar!