Becoming a truly customer focused organization takes effort. Remember:
“Nothing worth doing comes easily”
There are substantial pay-offs to aligning your business with your customers. With the Market Responsiveness Index we have proven that customer focused businesses excel in every financial measure important from sales revenue and profit growth and overall profitability.
Unfortunately a key hurdle for many leaders comes when faced with the decision to sacrifice a short term profit in the hope of a longer term pay-off.
What do I mean by this?
There are three investments leaders must make in shifting the culture:
1. The investment of time, energy and thought to what it means to be customer focused. To paint a vision that people buy into and build a strategy to achieve that vision, just like any other business endeavor.
2. A financial investment in understanding customers in unique ways that will allow the company to compete more effectively in the future. There may also be decisions designed to build stronger loyalty that may cost the company in the short run but result in customers becoming long term advocates.
3. An investment in doing things differently. For companies to become customer focused, individuals need to become customer focused and this often requires developing new skills and a new mindset.
These investments take courage, strong leadership and ultimately are only undertaken by leaders that really care about having a sustained impact on their organizations.
Is your leadership committed to aligning the business with its customers?
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