Customers and Consumers as a source of Innovation

Abstract

This thesis is a case study of how customer feedback is used at Telenor Norway. The thesis distinguishes between viewing the customer as innovative, and using customers or customer feedback as a source of innovation. It finds that customers can be a source of incremental innovation, as well as inform major decisions that lead to organizational innovation. It also finds that to gather this feedback there needs to be a system in place that captures the most relevant feedback for innovation, as well as a functioning system and culture for facilitating this feedback throughout the company.

To do this, both qualitative and quantitative data are utilized. The qualitative data consists of interviews conducted with relevant employees at Telenor Norway. The quantitative data consists of text messages from Telenor’s customers, and social media data from the platform Twitter written by Norwegian consumers on the topic of Telenor. The customer feedback contains 50 000 free form text messages gathered by the company. The Twitter data was collected by the candidate through an Application Programming Interface, and contains over 5000 tweets. Both sets of data are analyzed using text-mining software.