Last week I made the point that meaningful innovation has to start with a purpose. The real question is what comes next. There are many theories to examine when you think about an innovation management process. A good place to start is to ask yourself if you have a defined process. Innovation at a simplistic level is about taking inputs and transforming them to different outputs. However, the magic lies in your ability to identify which inputs to tackle.
In our process we track and analyze many data points. With regard to consumers, we study their behavior to ensure that our processes are well-matched to how they want to interact with us. Innovation opportunities arise as consumers change to adapt to the world around them. Let’s review some surprising statistics.
- On average, Americans spend over 2.7 hours socializing on their mobile device.
www.pewinternet.org/Topics
http://www.txtstop.com/sms_statistics.cfm - 3.5 million text messages sent per minute in the US
www.pewinternet.org/Topics
http://www.txtstop.com/sms_statistics.cfm - Desktop ownership declined by 12% over the past five years
- Text messages are read by 94% of recipients
- Average text message read within four minutes versus 48 hours for email
- 50% of SMS text users are age 35+
Boston Consulting Group
http://www.txtstop.com/sms_statistics.cfm
Several years ago we compared consumer’s quickly evolving communication needs to our process and we identified a gap. Consequently, we began a quest to narrow this gap by offering communication methods that were in line with consumer expectations such as email and text appointment scheduling and confirmations.
Today we offer a full suite of communication options and we expect that we will continue to incrementally innovate as consumer’s needs and preferences evolve. New methods, such as text scheduling, have yielded an improvement in key performance metrics such as turnaround time and cancellation rate.
There is no doubt in my mind that consumer behavior is one of the most important things we can study. There is still a significant unmet need for life insurance and we are committed to raising awareness regarding the importance of life insurance. The clues to unlocking the door to a deeper level of consumer insight are all around us. Sometimes we just need to look to see them.