CASE STUDIES
THE CHALLENGE
It’s Melissa’s job to identify opportunities to bring products together from across the company to create more complete solutions that help customers accomplish more.
In other words, Melissa is responsible for figuring out how to help customers complete more of their job-to-be-done.
So, she was looking for hard data that would tell her more about the challenges her customers face and what gaps exist in their portfolio for addressing them.
“We were very open minded. We weren’t thinking, we have a product, let’s try to make it work. We were really listening and looking to understand, what are the biggest problems our customers are facing?”
THE SOLUTION
At this stage, no customer need was off the table.
“The product-focused people, they would listen and participate, but then say, well, Phillips isn’t going to solve that. And I think we’ve really taught the organization that, yes, maybe we are. We’re growing very fast, so maybe we are going to solve that problem.”
The Philips team focused on three customers—clinicians, the IT team, and hospital decision makers—all trying to monitor patients in an acute care setting.
The team conducted qualitative interviews to create a complete list of their customers’ needs—and some were broader than the team expected for patient monitoring solutions. For example, some clinicians were looking for advanced critical care parameters to be provided by the patient monitoring solutions.
Philips used ODI-based quantitative research techniques to prioritize customers’ desired outcomes. They were particularly happy to gain insight into which needs were under- and overserved.
Thanks to a large survey sample, Philips was able to segment their audience in a way that allowed them to see certain types of clinicians struggling with the job of patient monitoring more than others. This insight helped them to pinpoint important and underserved customer needs.
Using insights gleaned from the ODI process, Philips made immediate changes to their positioning and messaging. They also used the insights to inform longer-term changes to their patient monitoring portfolio.
THE RESULTS
Because most companies do concept testing—evaluating a specific solution or product—they miss opportunities to solve for broader customer needs.
It turned out that some of the clinicians’ most underserved needs were related to areas of the job the team had not previously considered addressing.
“We identified concerns from clinicians that would be pretty far outside of what we would typically ask a monitoring company to do. When we do traditional voice of customer, we’ve already got a concept, and we’re getting concept feedback. This allowed us to move upstream to really look at what the broader challenges are—so we could then figure out what the solutions might look like.”
These insights aligned the organization around a future roadmap for the acute patient monitoring portfolio.
Philips is now positioned to enter new markets by getting more of the job done with a portfolio of products. With a more complete, platform solution, Philips can go to market with a much more attractive offering.
In addition to the ODI insights providing the perfect input into the team’s product development process, they also made an immediate impact on sales and marketing. By updating the portfolio’s messaging to better address broader customer needs, they were able to accelerate deals in the pipeline.
After success with her initial ODI project, Melissa hopes to use the framework again to research additional geographic regions, as well as to dive deeper into a handful of specific customer needs.