Innovation meets customer centricity at Wolters Kluwer

Empathy is key to customer centricity. As Nancy acknowledges in the podcast; as the demands on our customers have been exacerbated over the years, so the company has responded. “It’s one of the core missions I have as CEO, to really keep track of not only what customers need …  but also what's happening in the market, particularly how our customers are dealing with technology, and other trends”, she says.

With millions of customers in more than 180 countries, and spanning students, professionals and C-suites across Health, Tax & Accounting, Governance, Risk & Compliance and Legal & Regulatory, this is no small task.

Still, as explored in the first podcast on Global Trends in Technology, Nancy and the company’s deep research reveals that customers are facing common challenges including huge pressures on productivity and being overwhelmed with information and regulatory complexity.

There has also been a major shift over the years in the type of expectations the company’s customers have. As Nancy observes, in the past, customers prided themselves on their own domain knowledge and doing research and spending the time to get the right answers. Now, however, they are looking for answers up front. Most importantly, they are looking to shift their own value proposition from, “Doing the work, to advising their clients.”

Don’t look for a great idea, look for a problem

As Greg Samios notes, helping customers achieve their ambition depends on unlocking deep insights into their specific pain points. Nancy concurs, explaining that uncovering—and solving—customer problems is possible at Wolters Kluwer thanks to four main elements:

• Employee expertise: The company employs practitioners across every division: doctors, nurses, health professionals, tax & accounting professionals, finance practitioners, and more. In addition, the company’s business units have advisory boards of practitioners, or work directly with practitioners themselves. This allows the company to uncover;
• Deep workflow insights: More and more in direct co-operation with customers, the company maps workflows in detail to identify pain points down at task level. As Nancy notes, there is almost no substitute for this approach. Gaining these workflow insights allows the company to identify specific use cases for;
• Intelligent technology: Through applying any number of specialized technologies to specific tasks, those tasks can be automated. By taking steps out of the workflow the company improves customers’ productivity. This helps customers move from ‘doing the work, to advising their clients’, so strengthening their own value proposition. Plus, often these technologies are applied through close cooperation with;
• External partnerships: In health markets, for example, Wolters Kluwer partners with electronic medical records companies and other players in the health ecosystem. The same trend is happening in tax and accounting too. Over time, these partnerships are becoming more important as they unlock value not only for Wolters Kluwer, but also our customers, their clients—and other partners too. The full innovation ecosystem benefits.

This ‘outside-in’ approach, focusing first on clearly defining the customer problem, is critical to innovation at Wolters Kluwer. As Nancy says, “I believe more and more that the way to bring in new technologies such as artificial intelligence or machine learning, is to focus on a very small pain point first. Get that right, and then build out from there.”

Evolution not revolution

From Google’s Moonshots to IBM’s Watson, ‘disruptive innovation’ is still the form of innovation currently capturing popular business imagination. However, Wolters Kluwer’s approach—through its long-standing innovation labs, code games, global innovation awards, minimal viable product development and more—is geared significantly towards a ‘sustaining’ form of innovation that keeps the customer close.

“If you look at every transformation we've been through as a company, from print to digital, from digital to workflow solutions, from on-premise to cloud, each of those migrations has taken many years. And I think that speaks to how our customers like to adapt their workflow, so it's more an evolution than a revolution” says Nancy.

In other words, managing the speed of innovation in line with adoption needs is key—once again underlining the pivotal role of the customer in innovation at Wolters Kluwer.

What is the future of innovation?

As Nancy says, the future of innovation at Wolters Kluwer lies in becoming ever-more customer centric, “The closer we move to our customers, the more innovative I believe we will become”. This is how the company aims to grow its value.

In society at large, a similar trend may be emerging. Critics are speaking out that the pursuit of disruptive innovation alone may be radically overvaluing its value to society. Looking at the tangible end impacts of innovation may offer a clue. In the case of Wolters Kluwer’s professional customers include doctors, nurses, lawyers and more. Their daily decisions help save lives, improve the way we do business, and build more just judicial and regulatory systems. Put in this context, the value of innovation to society at large for Wolters Kluwer is clear.