My Hotel Light Switch and the Three Easy Questions to Ask About Customer-Centric Innovation – Augie Ray

I checked into a hotel late last night after a long evening of travel. When it came time to go to bed, I was unable to locate the switch for the lamp over my desk. I spent five minutes testing every switch, feeling the underside of the ledge over the desk, and searching behind curtains for hidden switchplates, all in vain. Finally, I made an awkward call to the front desk to ask how to turn off the lights.

The response from the front desk sounded unsurprised and well-practiced. Look for a white button on the desk she told me. This is the magic button that controls the desk lamp:

Maybe I should’ve realized this was a light switch. Perhaps not. What I do know is that I am far from alone. The front-desk clerk shared she gets several calls a night from frustrated guests asking the same question. “There are no instructions,” she added, demonstrating a firmer grasp of usability concepts than this hotel chain’s innovation team. (How many guests, I wonder, go to bed with the lights on because they’re too embarrassed to ask.)

This left me pondering why so many brands get innovation so wildly wrong. Just 3% of users who enable Alexa or  Google voice apps are active users a mere two weeks later, and 75% of downloaded mobile apps are opened only once. When your brand makes investments into innovative customer experiences, is that the kind of adoption and success you seek?

The problem with too many innovation efforts is that brands focus on the tech, not the customer. By failing to be customer-centric in their thinking, brands end up with “solutions” that do nothing important for customers, leading to depressed usage and disappointing KPIs. It may be fine to pilot new tech simply to gain knowledge, but wouldn’t it be better to achieve that same knowledge while simultaneously creating something customers want?

Customer-centric innovation requires answers to three fundamental questions before committing to development:

Those simple questions help you to understand if your innovative ideas are potential customer-centric hits or wasteful misses. So, does that special button on my hotel desk meet these goals?

Why spend a dime on a new way to turn on and off lights that solves no customer problem, is confusing and confounding to use, and adds nothing to your brand’s customer experience? I won’t avoid the hotel chain as a result of this experience, but neither did it endear the brand to me. This was an investment that, as far as I can tell, did nothing to help the brand or the customer.

Ask those three customer-centric questions to acid test your innovation ideas. If you can answer yes to those questions, then your idea is much more likely to lift your customer satisfaction, loyalty, and brand advocacy.