CCA has made initial updates to the CLEAR Methodology for clean cooking carbon projectsRead the Latest

Customer Experience (CX) Prototyping Sprints

Testing a “sprint” approach, the UIL helped two clean cooking enterprises design and run prototype services and marketing activities to better understand customer needs and experiment with solutions to improve customer experience. 

Why this is needed: CCA’s benchmarking data and enterprise feedback suggests that companies struggle to connect with and meet customers’ needs after the initial purchase of a clean cooking technology. The UIL wanted to test whether short-term support that empowers enterprises to prototype around customer needs could change the way enterprises think about and serve their customers. 

What the UIL did: The UIL conducted rapid customer research, identified opportunity areas, and worked with the enterprises to design and refine prototype solutions to customer problems. One company prototyped solutions that provided stronger support to their retailers, who are the face of the company’s brand for customers. The other company prototyped and tested marketing initiatives to reconnect with former customers. With coaching support, the enterprises ran the prototypes and collected data to learn from the prototype experiments for 6-8 weeks. 

What the UIL learned: Not all clean cooking companies are directly connected to their customers, which impedes their ability to gather useful customer feedback. Previously, enterprises had not tried simple solutions due to competing priorities. The sprints provided space and support to experiment, but were too short to mobilize big changes. Through the pilots, we uncovered cross-cutting business challenges, validating our hypothesis that a focus on CX can align business functions to deliver more value for customers and yield other business benefits. 

What’s next: Based on the learning from this project, the UIL’s new Customer Centricity Initiative will pilot a more intensive approach to transforming enterprises’ customer experiences by creating alignment across internal functions to deliver on customer experience objectives.