Technology organizations must invest in a “customer zero” program to drive internal innovation, improve quality, and demonstrate they believe in their own products and services. Credit: ipopba / Getty Images The source of competitive advantage for a leading technology company is its ability to rapidly develop, sell, and deploy innovative products, services, and solutions. Without this innovation engine, a strong market position can rapidly evaporate as customers migrate to newer, cheaper, or more fit-for-purpose alternatives. To stave off this existential threat, leading B2B tech companies prioritize a “customer zero” or “dog food” program as a central thread from product development through customer success and support. The purpose of a customer zero program is to be the first and best customer of one’s own products, services, and/or solutions in order to accelerate product innovation and enhance go-to-market capabilities, customer stickiness, and market insight. A best-in-class customer zero program’s charter will comprise of both internally focused objectives as well as an external-market orientation. Internally, a customer zero program will work across product lines to be a: Product design and innovation partner Alpha & beta early adopter Deployment consultant Customer success consiglieri Source of customer intelligence & co-innovation Externally, a customer zero program will super-charge sales motions and customer success enablement by: Designing an operating model across the company’s partner/vendor ecosystem Advising on in-production architecture and engineering Change management and training best practices Ongoing deployment lessons learned across new product/feature rollouts, adaptation to new regulations, or integration with other technologies Illustrating how the company quantifies the benefit realized from its own products Enterprise customers expect that tech companies’ offerings are high quality, valuable, and scalable. With this dual internal and external remit, a CIO must optimize the balance of accelerating the velocity of high-credibility feedback cycles, while managing and mitigating the operational risk introduced by new offering evaluation and validation. A typical pattern is for a customer zero program to be structured into two operating modes, with appropriate decision criteria: one model that is anchored in testing new offerings in controlled, but credible environments; and another that is intended to demonstrate scale, stability, and mission criticality. The nature of the tech company’s products will dictate the criteria for each model (i.e., a product that automates website personalization may have higher production-ready risk tolerance than one publishing financial results to Wall Street). Like all investments, when establishing a customer zero program, CIOs should define clear success measures that are shared with partners in product development, sales, professional services, customer success, and customer support. IT cannot be successful if it is brought in for feedback two weeks before a product launch, or if it is only responsible for running the product in production. End-to-end partnership across design, deployment, and operations is critical to be credible with prospects and customers. When appropriately funded and mobilized, a world-class customer zero program will increase the number of offerings evaluated per quarter, reduce the number of defects deployed to customers, deepen customer engagement satisfaction, reduce customer support tickets, and ultimately improve a company’s positioning to sell holistic, sticky solutions to an enterprise market. Related content Opinion How can CIOs protect Personal Identifiable Information (PII) for a new class of data consumers? Enterprises and data owners must ensure customer data privacy while training their machine learning models. Let us learn how. By Yash Mehta Mar 22, 2023 10 mins Data Privacy Data Science Machine Learning Opinion Signals from space: SD-WAN marks the next stage in commercialized space-based comms As remote enterprise branch locations digitally transform, requiring more bandwidth, SD-WAN sets the stage for mass adoption of space-based comms. By Ed Fox Mar 17, 2023 5 mins SD-WAN Telecommunications Opinion What your CFO really needs in periods of economic uncertainty Keeping tabs on these three topics will strengthen your relationship with the CFO and improve your capacity to tackle expanded roles in the C-suite. By Michael Bertha Mar 15, 2023 5 mins CFO CIO IT Leadership Opinion How to ensure security in a cloud migration CIO followers expound on ways to stay secure when moving to the cloud. By Paul Desmond Feb 07, 2023 9 mins Cloud Management Cloud Security Security Podcasts Videos Resources Events SUBSCRIBE TO OUR NEWSLETTER From our editors straight to your inbox Get started by entering your email address below. Please enter a valid email address Subscribe