7 key strategic questions essential for gaining growth in 2023

It’s a new year so we decided we needed an update.  A few years ago, we gave you some rules for gaining growth. But times have changed, and so the rules need to change, too. Therefore, we took another pass at the questions that can help your organization gain growth in 2023. 

In some ways, these are more like provocations than questions. However, we aren’t picking a fight. We are, however, trying to be provocative. In fact, we usually ask them because we know that people can’t answer them. We want them to realize that they don’t know these answers and get them thinking about it so we can help them move forward. 

The first two questions you are probably familiar with already. They set the stage for what we are trying to uncover. Then, we move into specifics about what customers want from your experience. Next come the future questions that explore areas about where you should be trying to go and the tools you can use to get there. Finally, we get into a question about my absolute favorite part of experiences, memory. 

In this episode, we explore what we ask and why. We also talk about what they need to realize from their answers and how it can help them gain growth in the new year. 

Key Ideas to Improve your Customer Experience

One company we helped move forward was Maersk Line, the world’s largest shipping company. We hosted one of the successful leaders of this organization on another episode to share the five rules for a highly successful implementation. One of the things Maersk shared is that these questions made a difference in their improvement program—which is saying something since they improved their scores by 40 points over 30 months. 

Here are some other key moments in the discussion:

• 07:36  After we discuss Maersk line, we get into our second strategic question that explores how customer-centric your organization is, and how that affects your growth.
• 10:21  We get into an area that we are devoting a whole episode to soon, which is about how people describe their experience with you, as well as what they really want and what drives value for them, all crucial areas to answer for your experience. 
• 18:34 This kicks off the future part of the strategic questions, where we talk about predicting customer behavior and using Customer Science to be successful at it.  
• 20:42 Ryan takes a 2,000-word detour to express how he agrees with Colin, much to his chagrin and Colin’s supreme delight. 
• 28:19 We talk about Colin’s favorite subject memory, and why it matters so much to make them deliberately in your experience.
• 29:31  We summarize the seven strategic questions and how you can actually work on them on top of everything else you have to do—and why you should make time for them. 

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Customer Experience Information & Resources

LinkedIn recognizes Colin Shaw as one of the 'World's Top 150 Business Influencers.' As a result, he has 290,000 followers of his work. Shaw is Founder and CEO of Beyond Philosophy LLC, which helps organizations unlock growth by discovering customers' hidden, unmet needs that drive value ($). The Financial Times selected Beyond Philosophy as one of the best management consultancies for the last four years in a row. Follow Colin on LinkedIn and Twitter.

Click here to learn more about Professor Ryan Hamilton of Emory University.

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