Despite professed customer centricity, many firms don’t think to involve customers, employees, or key partners in the experience design process. That’s unfortunate, because this activity — called co-creation — can help companies understand what types of interactions will best meet people’s needs and then figure out how to implement those interactions the right way.

Co-creation might sound familiar. Some people use the term to refer to Facebook ideation contents or crowdsourcing websites like mystarbucksidea.com. But in the experience design world, co-creation isn’t about soliciting hundreds or thousands of ideas through an online community. It’s the process of face-to-face active collaboration for the improvement and/or innovation of mutually beneficial products, services, or experiences. During co-creation workshops, teams focus on eliciting deep insights from participants — and translating those insights into tangible prototypes that can be evaluated in real time.

Co-creation is an extremely versatile tool, one that can inform the design of discrete touchpoints, complex customer journeys, emotionally resonant experiences, and just about anything else you can think of — even the employee experience. But pulling off an effective co-creation session requires extensive planning, preparation, and willingness to let a few customers behind the scenes.

So what’s the payoff? In our recent report, Amelia Sizemore and I outline several of the benefits co-creation provides, including:

Mobile payments saw continued innovation and competitive disruption throughout 2012, but consumer adoption lagged behind the industry hype. The Forrester Research Mobile Payments Forecast, 2012 To 2017 (US) shows that US consumers will adopt mobile payments at an accelerating rate over the next five years, reaching $90 billion by the end of 2017. Lower barriers to adoption, increased convenience, and early entrants striving for scale will be important drivers of growth.

Although the mobile wallet marketplace is still in its early stages today, players across the ecosystem are vying for consumer trust. Trust is often based on prior experiences: Forrester’s North American Technographics® Retail Online Benchmark Recontact Survey, Q3 2012 (US) shows that nearly half of current US PayPal users would trust PayPal as their mobile wallet provider. However, for those who don't use PayPal, the most trusted source is a bank or credit card issuer.

The recently published Forrester report “How PayPal Uses Exploratory Research To Drive A Culture Of Customer-Focused Innovation” shows how PayPal conducts exploratory research to understand the tradeoffs and emotions related to consumer payment behaviors to create better products and experiences. The insights gathered from the research helped the product development process.

If Loyalty 1.0 was all about discounts, points, and miles, Loyalty 2.0 is all about differentiation and engagement. Competition for customer attention is steeper than ever, and companies are always looking for innovative ways to set their loyalty programs apart. But the loyalty landscape is chock full of shiny pennies (and some not-so-shiny pennies) claiming to offer a solution to this engagement problem. Throw rapidly evolving technologies, channels, and tactics into the mix, and marketers have a lot to consider when deciding where to make their bets.

If you’re nodding your head, you aren’t alone, and you are in the right place. Cutting through the clutter is exactly what our latest report, “TechRadar™ For Customer Intelligence Professionals: Customer Loyalty Programs, Q1 2013” (subscription required) is all about. We spent the past several months investigating the current maturity, business value-add, and future trajectory of 13 loyalty tools, including affiliate networks, card-linked rewards, coupons, location-based services, mobile applications, program websites, and social rewards. At a high level, we came away with two key observations:

To avoid brand dilution, RIM’s corporate brand name is disappearing today and is being replaced by BlackBerry for shareholders and employees in an attempt to instill brand values internally.

While the (too) long-awaited new Blackberry OS is innovative and will help reduce churn among BlackBerry’s 79 million existing subscribers to competing devices from Apple and Android in 2013, the longer-term challenge for the BlackBerry brand is still huge.

Don’t get me wrong: The great strides that BlackBerry’s made in the device and OS deserve credit.

The two new devices announced today — in a price range above $500 — also look great and on par with, if not better than, the best high-end smartphones on the market today; they have eventually put an end to the poor browsing, app, and multimedia experiences delivered on BlackBerry devices until now. The new OS brings some very interesting and innovative features. The smart contextual prediction keyboard, the BlackBerry Hub, the BlackBerry Balance, as well as the new video chat and screen-sharing functionalities available to BBM users will also offer a seamless and innovative experience to the “business execs,” “working moms,” and “hyperactive teens” that BlackBerry is targeting. Telecom carriers will also significantly support the new devices, with about 200 operators worldwide launching them by June 2013. Why? BlackBerry devices have always delivered more profitable customers to carriers because of their network efficiency. Due to the limited uptake (for now) of Microsoft’s Windows Phone 8, telecom operators will no doubt give the new products a chance to succeed in order to avoid being dependent on Apple or Google.

However, there is little rationale today for most product strategists and marketers to invest in customized BlackBerry experiences.