To become a successful "future customer innovating" organisation, where firms seek to move towards an individual-centric and experience-based view of customer value, managers need to address a new set of questions and overcome a number of significant internal barriers. For a start, simply recognising the opportunity requires bold leaps in managerial imagination and attitudes towards customers as they become the specifiers of value. It requires managers to acknowledge that the boundaries between their organisations, their partners and individual customers are disappearing. New individual-centric and experience-based dimensions of customer value also necessitate new collaboration processes defined by hetergeneous interaction with active, empowered individuals and value network partners rather than by the organised control of passive consumers. This is particularly the case regarding the ownership and distribution of customer and network knowledge. Here, managers must develop ethical, transparent and accessible information systems and expert customer knowledge management capabilities in order to maintain sufficient levels of trust and collaboration within the network.
In addition, an aspiring individual-centric customer innovator must assess whether their existing brands have the necessarily levels of trust and reputation to support a substantive shift in market orientation in the development and mediation of a customer experience value network. The "brand manager" must also weigh up the potential negative effects of distributing the ownership of its accrued brand trust across a network of partners. In fact, for many businesses, this risk of brand exposure represents the greatest barrier to the adoption of a more explicit active customer orientation.
A further barrier is the difficulty of achieving coordinated network innovation, collaboration and critical mass. Indeed, delivering a systemic innovation of this nature is particularly difficult when industry standards and operational infrastructure do not exist and must be pioneered. Although the advent of web services promises to enable a company to connect its applications to any number of trading partners relatively inexpensively and easily, many organisations remain islands of technology, operating their own assortment of systems, applications, databases, and communications technologies. Thus, a critical challenge also lies in discovering how and when to build the bridge to the consumer, which customer communities to select and who to share the costs of developing the standards for constructing network value.
However, for firms choosing to adopt an individual-centric customer strategy, there are evidently some important benefits, not least of which is the opportunity to develop deep levels of customer commitment leading to greater levels of loyalty and expenditure. By focusing on facilitating the creation of new customer experience spaces, particularly to deliver holistic and connected forms of value that people may not have previously experienced, studies show that greater trust can be earned and new brand extensions achieved more easily. It is possible, therefore, that the new customer value networks, founded on clear principles of consumer dialogue, interaction, transparency, support and advocacy, might realise a more authentic means of building long-term, mutual dependency between businesses and their customers. It would also provide new roles and skills for front-line employees many of whom will be empowered to resolve customer problems.
From an economic perspective, individual-centric customer networks have the potential to deliver greater economies of scope through network convergence (from the removal of functional duplication), knowledge-sharing and reductions in network customer acquisition and retention costs. Indeed, cost improvements in the matching of demand and supply are fundamental to the participation of value network partners.
Because the nodal network companies at the centre of the new customer value networks are capable of accerssing superior market-sensing and market-relating capabilities, these customer-innovating organisations are likely to challenge established practices, sense new market opportunities and create substantial economic, functional and emotive value more quickly for customers, partners and shareholders.
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