Author Archives: Dr Linden Brown

It’s not about huge transformations, it’s about small customer-centric practices that make a big difference

Posted on December 28, 2022 | Leave a comment

While some organizations need to engage in large transformation projects that involve seismic changes in business models, technology, products and services, and people, to survive, these are the exception rather than the norm.

Many leaders believe that changing to a stronger customer-centric business requires disruptive change with a high risk of failure, so they fail to act. Yes, it can be risky, as many case studies point out.

Why?

Many customer-centric initiatives lack the right measurement and lack a coherent strategy to strengthen the foundation of customer-centricity – culture. They also include too many projects that dilute focus and diffuse efforts. By not including these crucial ingredients, initiatives falter, and engagement and buy-in of leaders and employees is lost.

But it doesn’t have to be that way!

Strengthening your customer-centric culture can be achieved with consistent, easy-to-implement, practices that everyone in an organization can adopt. It should be preceded by measurement to know where you stand, so you don’t spend money on initiatives that are not necessary. Also, you will identify those initiatives that will make a significant difference.

Many of the world’s best practices are simple and easy to implement such as placing “customer” as the starting item on the agenda at every meeting. You will need to create a logic as to “why” meetings should start with a discussion about customers and an emotional connection that includes a customer story as to how those discussions benefit customers, employees, and the business.

If this, and other easy-to-adopt practices are implemented and become habits of behavior, your customer culture will become stronger. In addition, all the other things you do, such as getting feedback from customers and collaborating in teams to create value for customers, will multiply the benefits to your customers, your team, and your business.

The trick is to first know where you stand through measurement. This is the catalyst to gain buy-in and commitment from leaders and employees to implement specific practices. Then, check progress along the way and measure the benefits.

If you follow this process, your teams and your organization will transform before your eyes – and it will not only be painless, but it will be easy to continue. The risks are low and the payoffs can be high!

Result? Engaged and inspired leaders and team members. Appreciative and loyal customers. Growth and profit for the business. Satisfied shareholders.

What’s in it for you as a leader of this approach?

Great satisfaction from making a real difference and rapid promotion based on demonstrated success!

Ready to take your customer centricity to the next level? Don’t miss out on value insights that can help you improve customer centricity. Visit MRI Benchmark!

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It’s not about customer projects, it’s about an ongoing program of unity of customer mindset focus and practices by everyone in the business.

Posted on December 14, 2022 | Leave a comment

Today, many organizations have a myriad of projects designed to help the business become more customer-centric.

Ask anyone in a large government department that is looking to provide better services and improved service for its customers. Or in a large insurance company or a large manufacturer. They will tell you “we have 32 projects on the go for that.” Yes, they do.

But are they effective in achieving their goal? Sometimes, but mostly not!

Why?

In too many businesses, there is no overall program that creates a unified focus on customers for everyone in the organization. Without this, you have diverging interests and motivations aligned with specific projects. I am not criticizing people here. It is natural that individuals and teams will enthusiastically work on their own projects. But this can be counterproductive for the organization in moving forward as one unified group. It can enhance silo thinking – not silos around functions but silos around projects. Does this look like your organization?

What’s needed?

You must have singular priorities that everyone understands, agrees on, and is motivated to act on. You must have agreed on customer-centric practices and actions that everyone commits to doing. You must have a shared understanding of what your customer segments’ needs are. And you must know, how in your role and function, you can add value for those customers. In short, you need a unified and shared mindset, priorities, and agreed practices that are acted upon day in and day out.

One company we work with has what they call a Success Index. This tool is used by everyone in the business to document the actions they are committed to over 3 months, 6 months, and beyond. Each quarter each individual and their boss reviews their progress and an index is used to measure their success.

This is a simple and powerful tool when used to create unity around a customer mindset supported by tangible practices that lead to increased value for customers and work colleagues.

How do you get started?

First, get feedback from employees on what is working and not working applying the 8 disciplines framework that we know are the foundation of customer-centric practices used by the most highly customer-centric organizations in the world.

Find out more about this research-based 8 disciplines methodology at MarketCulture.

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It’s not about the leaders’ views on customers, it’s about independent measurement

Posted on November 30, 2022 | Leave a comment

If you ask senior leaders how customer-centric is the business they lead, the chances are that they will be much more positive than the reality.

If you ask 10 people in a business from different functions how customer-centric their business is, they will likely give widely different opinions.

If you ask 500 people, you will definitely get a wide variety of views.

If you ask 1000, there will be an even wider divergence.

Why?

Because they don’t objectively measure the most vital ingredient of customer centricity – customer culture: that is, what people in the business do that impacts customers. Specifically – how do they behave and what practices do they implement day in and day out with respect to customers.

We know from countless studies that an organization’s customer-centric culture drives customer experience that in turn drives customer retention and loyalty that leads to higher growth and profit as shown in this diagram.

If you don’t embed a strong customer culture right across the organization, you won’t get the rest – retained customers, trust, productivity, growth, and profit. Also, as a leader, you won’t get your team behind you or the momentum you need to be successful. At best your performance will be short-term, at worst it could be disastrous.

To get a strong customer culture you must find out where you are today through objective measurement that includes feedback from a large sample of people in your team or your business. Not just any measurement like employee engagement or net promoter score. Both of these measures are useful, but they do not measure customer culture.

This culture gap is a risky blind spot where decisions are taken in the dark and money invested on improving customer experience is lost.

You must use a purpose-built customer culture measurement tool. This must include universal behaviors that have been definitively found and tested to enable you to assess your company’s level of customer-centric practices – benchmarked against the most customer-centric and profitable businesses in the world.

There is only one purpose-built, validly tested, and reliably implemented customer culture measurement tool in the world – the Market Responsiveness Index (MRI). This has been used by more than 1000 organizations over the last 10 years and helped them create a unified view of their level of customer culture that everyone can agree on – and act to strengthen.

Visit us at MarketCulture to take this vital step.

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What happens in your business when things go wrong – is it a triumph or a disaster?

Posted on November 16, 2022 | Leave a comment
Image Source: Social Samosa

The ultimate stress test of your customer culture is when things go wrong for the customer.

The recent cyber-attacks on Australian businesses Optus and Medibank are cases in point. A survey was done of 2,000 Optus telecommunication customers who suffered a privacy breach. The survey found that 56% of current customers answered ‘yes’ when asked if they were considering changing telcos as a direct result of the cyber-attack, while 10% had already left. The customer comments were highly critical of Optus and its communication.

One commented that there had been no direct contact either by email, text or phone and said: “Their handling has been appalling.”

Also, research has found that many customers were paying too much for their phone plans by paying for much more data than they were using.

See “Optus customers hang up”, Daily Telegraph.com.au, October 31 2022, page 9.

Optus has apologized publicly, but that is not enough. The lack of an authentic customer-centric culture has shown that customers are not being treated as people and that as an organization they don’t act as if really care.

Not only will there be large compensation costs for Optus to pay but the massive impact longer term is the loss of customers and loss of trust.

One lesson is that if you have not already built a strong customer-centric culture in your business you will suffer in a crisis – by losing customers, trust, revenue, and profit that will require very large investments to rebuild. This is a culture where everyone has some engagement with customers and a mindset that treats customers as individuals and proactively communicates and takes action to help them,

One challenge for many organizations is to really know to what extent that culture exists. Is there a high risk that you can be blindsided, like Optus?

The answer: measure it and then take action to improve if you need to.

Remember: What’s best for the customer is best for your business!

Dr Linden Brown, Dr Chris L Brown and Sean Crichton-Browne

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It’s not about the customer strategy, it’s the culture, stupid!!

Posted on November 2, 2022 | Leave a comment
Source: leisa reichelt Freelance UX Consultant‘Culture eats strategy for breakfast’  Strategic User Experience (ConfabUK 2013)

Every time we look we see a report from surveys of the status of customer experience (CX) inside companies that show a high percentage of leaders are dissatisfied with their CX strategy and they plan to change it in the next year. This might also include changing the CX leader.

CX quality appears to be declining as reported from Forrester’s 2022 Customer Experience Index report where they note: “US companies have lost the vital focus on customers that they gained at the beginning of the pandemic in 2020. Forrester’s 2022 US Customer Experience (CX) Benchmark study reveals losses in CX quality across 13 industries. It requires an enterprise-wide effort to put customers at the center of an organization’s leadership, strategy, and operations”

A small 2022 survey of Australian and New Zealand companies by CXFOCUS suggests that a majority of Australian & New Zealand companies are not satisfied with their current customer experience strategies. The same poll revealed that more than 80% of companies are planning major changes to their CX strategy in the coming months.

Source: CXFocus

What is not addressed is the blindingly obvious. It’s not the strategy that is the problem, it’s the culture. The customer strategy may be brilliant, average or even weak, but the core of the strategy is not implemented, even in its basic form, because it is held back by the corporate culture. Even customer journey mapping may be well-documented and attempts made at linking each customer interface point with actions for improvement for customers. But what is missing is a company-wide, business-wide or function-wide customer culture that creates customer engagement and customer value creation/improvements across all parts of the organization.

If you want a better customer strategy you must have a customer-centered culture where everyone in the business has a mindset and customer awareness that motivates them to act on value improvements for customers, no matter what their role or function.

Now, when this is so obvious, why don’t leaders in organizations address it? Some believe the customer culture is much stronger than it actually is. Others believe it is too hard to change. Still, others believe it is not worth it.

Let’s consider. Almost all those who believe it is strong don’t have any objective evidence to support it other than anecdotal stories. We know this is the case because we have the only valid evidence-based customer culture measurement tool called the Market Responsiveness Index (MRI). We have found wide variations in businesses between leaders’ and employees’ perceptions and variations across functions.

Those who believe it is too hard to change, have not experienced a methodology where it is specifically designed to modify easy-to-change behaviors that can provide substantial improvements for customers and for work colleagues with whom they interact. Today’s world requires people in organizations to change their behaviors with customers. Like our experience with COVID, we can change.

Those who believe it is not worth it should consider this:- the companies that are highly customer-centric with strong customer cultures are among the most profitable in their industries and in the world. Second, consider where you will be if you don’t have a strong customer culture – you will have a customer strategy that is not implemented, a business strategy that is not effective, and a purpose and mission that is not achieved.

If you want a profitable customer strategy, first measure your level of customer-centric culture. Contact us to find out more.

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Why Customer Experience fails in organizations!

Posted on June 4, 2018 | Leave a comment

Contemplating cx failure

Recently I asked a colleague, Sean Gallagher, President at Influence
Success, to review our book, The Customer Culture Imperative,
compared with other books that address the area of customer
experience.

He said”: “Many books on customer experience are useful and
interesting reads. And I found Professor Phil Klaus’ book (Measuring
Customer Experience) and Fred Reichheld’s book (The Ultimate
Question 2.0) very useful because they are based on real scientific
research.

What do Zappos, Starbucks, Ritz-Carlton, Oasis, Disney, Nordstrom,
Apple, and Amazon have in common regarding how they run their
business? They all share best practice techniques in a variety of
areas that anyone can theoretically copy. Countless number of
companies have tried to copy these best practices and failed. Why?

All these companies are amazingly different. What is the common
thread used to drive superior customer experience and superior
profitability at these companies? Their cultures! And all their
cultures are different on the surface. Amazon is very different from
Zappos, even though Amazon owns Zappos.”

Sean said: “For my money, the most valuable (and readable) book on
customer experience is called The Customer Culture Imperative: A
Leader’s Guide to Driving Superior Performance. The authors studied
the academic research that uncovers the elements of culture that
enables a firm to create a strong customer-focused culture that
delivers both superior customer experience and superior
profitability. They use numerous real-life examples to illustrate the
elements of culture that make all the companies listed above different,
but the differences are rooted in the same soil.

Customer experience best practices are important but are bound
to fail unless rooted in the soil of an organization’s culture.

The Customer Culture Imperative is the best book I’ve found for insights
on transforming a culture that can deliver both superior customer
experience and superior profitability.”

Our vision at MarketCulture is to help leaders understand the importance of building a customer-obsessed culture by engaging of employees. Our assessment, the MRI, provides valuable feedback to help leaders act on what is vital to creating great customer experiences, which will lead to increased business performance.

Is your company customer obsessed? MarketCulture has a unique tool that can provide the strengths and weaknesses of your customer culture against 100’s of companies like Virgin, Apple, Google and Amazon. Ask us for free pilot today!

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Posted in Customer Centric Culture, Customer Centric Leadership, Customer Culture Failure, Customer Experience, Customer Obsessed Leadership, Customer Obsession, Market Culture in Action, Market Culture Inaction, Market Responsiveness Index

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How do leaders become customer-centric?

Posted on May 28, 2018 | Leave a comment

roll_of_the_dice_chance

Source: OCEAN/CORBIS

To answer this question it can be helpful to start with the opposite question: why aren’t leaders Customer-Centric? In many cases, it appears to depend on chance!

There are many reasons leaders are driven away from being truly customer-centric:

  • the dominant profit and shareholder value focus in many organizations,
  • the siloed and internal focus in most large corporations,
  • the pressure on short-term results at the cost of customer relationships and customer value.

But these are not the most important reasons!

In our research of more than 65 senior leaders around the globe customer-centric leadership occurs by chance – an upbringing in a family that runs a small business, working for a boss who happens to be customer-centric, an experience in a business that is ruined by lack of attention to customers.

What is lacking in organizations and tertiary learning institutions is the systematic training and development of leadership with a specific customer-centric focus.

There are virtually no university courses around the globe dedicated to the teaching of customer-centric leadership. Most organizations do not have this as a focused L&D program for senior leadership, the extended leadership group or for prospective and aspiring leaders.

How can you expect leaders to have the new currency of customer-centric leadership required for success by the new world of disruption and customer-driven strategies if you leave it to chance?

There are simply too many organizational pressures working against it.

Don’t leave your organization’s fate up to chance!

There is an answer. Research reported in The Customer Culture Imperative tells you what is required. Learn more about our dedicated Learning and Development programs for leaders at here.

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Posted in Authenticity, Change Leadership, Customer Centric Culture, Customer Centric Leadership, Customer Centric Values, Customer Communications, Customer Obsessed Leadership, Customer Obsession, Customer-Centricity, Empathy, leadership

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Can you continue to charge customers after they are dead?

Posted on May 16, 2018 | Leave a comment

I_fee_dead_people_chris_taylor

Source: Chris Roy Taylor https://twitter.com/chrisroytaylor

Many company leaders don’t know the difference between front-line customer focus and real customer centricity (and some don’t seem to care). This leads to devastating results.

These days many companies collect a large amount of data from customers and use this to analyze to what extent they are customer-centric. This includes customer satisfaction data, customer advocacy metrics like net promoter scores and other customer feedback related to customer interactions with the company.

They fail to realize that these data averages are only a small part of the picture – and not the most important part.

Authentic customer centricity is a culture across all parts of a business that reflects a mindset that believes “what’s best for the customer is best for the business”. It also requires employee behaviors and company processes in every business unit, function, and level endeavor to meet the needs of their customers. Also to provide value for money and deliver a consistently great customer experience – before, during and after all customer interactions.

The current Royal Commission into banking practices in Australia has unearthed some very unsavory practices – charging fees to some customers for services they never received, continuing to charge fees on customer accounts after people have died – and continuing these practices over several years. It is also uncovering the “bad” advice for some clients by some financial planners – something already uncovered in previous investigations. This is clearly a failure of leadership either governed by self-interest or not really have the customers’ interests at heart.

Why is this persisting? It is because many leaders in this industry do not understand the difference between front-line customer focus and real customer centricity!

These same banking organizations have studied their own customer service scores and concluded they are customer-centric. They fail to realize that weaknesses in customer culture can be devastating. Even now at the early stages of this banking investigation, customer and community trust in banks is dramatically reduced and their share prices have dropped.

It is time leaders spend some time understanding this difference and taking action with all their employees to embed a true customer first culture in all parts of their businesses. If they don’t they will inevitably suffer the fate of the banks – more regulation, lost community trust, reduced profitability and customers lost to industry disruptors.

Find out how to do it in The Customer Culture Imperative.

Learn how to implement a methodology that measures and benchmarks your customer-first culture against the most customer-obsessed organizations across the globe.

Learn how to develop a customer culture roadmap and initiatives that will reduce your culture risk and create sustainable long-term customer trust and business performance.

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Posted in Customer Culture Failure, Customer Metrics, Market Culture Inaction

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What drives leaders to become customer-obsessed?

Posted on May 9, 2018 | 1 comment

Mature Man Clutching Arm As Warning Of Heart Attack

I was speaking recently with Rashid Velemeev, CEO of Sindbad Travel, one of Russia’s biggest online travel booking agencies based in St Petersburg. We were discussing customer-centric leaders and he mentioned that he believed an important characteristic is that they feel internal pain.

They can’t accept the way things are and they must change it to relieve their pain. It may be an experience of very poor service or of a product that does not work properly or an experience with people in a company who just don’t care. It creates a burning desire to do something about it.

When we think about this we realize that many businesses are started today because the founder has had a very poor customer experience and feels compelled to fill the gap created in the marketplace. It becomes a passion to make things right and if implemented well becomes a very good business.

Are you a leader that feels pain because things are not done right in your business to consistently deliver customer satisfaction? Do you feel the pain personally with each customer complaint?

If so you can relieve that pain by learning to implementing some of the ideas in our book: The Customer Culture Imperative. 

…AND now you can learn how to in our MarketCulture Academy

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Posted in Customer Centric Culture, Customer Centric Leadership, Customer Obsessed Culture, Customer Obsessed Leadership, Customer Obsession, market culture

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Failure of Culture: Australian Cricketers do the Unthinkable.

Posted on April 17, 2018 | Leave a comment

Cricket Bowler in Action

The game of cricket is central to Australia’s self-image – we believe we play the game hard but fair and always within the spirit of giving everyone a fair go, whether it be a sport, business or in our relationships with people. As a country, we don’t cheat but want to win fair and square.

When someone does something wrong, we say “it’s just not cricket”.

Universally recognized as the greatest cricketer (and one of the greatest sportsman anywhere) of all time, Australian Sir Donald Bradman, said: “When considering the stature of an athlete, I place great store on certain qualities to be essential in addition to skill. They are that a person conducts his or her life with dignity, with integrity, with courage and perhaps most of all modesty. These virtues are totally compatible with pride, ambition, determination, and competitiveness”.

In March 2018 when the Australian cricket captain, vice-captain and a new player to the team were caught on camera and admitted to a preplanned act to illegally tamper with the cricket ball during a game to make it more difficult for the opposition batsmen to hit, it struck at the heart of what it means to play the game, but more fundamentally struck at the heart of who Australians think they are as a nation – “we are not cheaters”.

In the 2015 Deflategate controversy in America’s National Football League (NFL) it was alleged that Tom Brady, the famous New England Patriots quarterback, probably knew of the footballs being supplied for games by his team were deliberately deflated. This ended with Brady receiving a 4 game suspension and the Patriots receiving sanctions.

This is not new in cricket, football or in other sports – think cycling, think baseball, think Olympic athletes from a myriad of countries and sports. In some countries and sports, cheating is systematic and inherent in their culture.

But for Australian cricket, this was a tangible result of a failure of culture ending in an uproar from cricket fans and the public. Standards of the on-field behavior of Australian cricketers have been deteriorating for years with “sledging” (personal insults) of opposition cricketers becoming the norm. This type of mindset has lead to a “win at all costs” culture and ultimately to a belief that doing something illegal (so long as you can get away with it) is acceptable. Some reports suggest that this ugly behavior has flowed down through the grades of cricket even to schoolboy cricket.

Unlike the famous All Blacks, New Zealand’s world champion national rugby union team, Australian cricket – some players, coaching staff, administrators – has lost sight of who are its most important stakeholders – namely the fans and its custodian role of representing the pride of the Australian nation. In preplanning the ball tampering act no-one asked the question: “What would the fans think of this?” or “What would the average Australian think of us doing this?” More broadly – “what do the majority of Australians think of our on-field behavior?” There was no consideration of the legacy left by Sir Donald Bradman.

This been a breach of trust that will take time and sustained effort to regain. It has also resulted in commercial losses from withdrawn sponsorships and likely reduced revenue from broadcast rights.

This is a lesson to all of us in business. What are we there for? – only ourselves or some greater cause?

When you are in doubt over a decision you are taking, ask the question: “What would our customers think of us doing this?” or even more personally “What would my mother think of us doing this?”

But, there’s an even bigger question.

Do we have a corporate culture that encourages good behavior and automatically does the right thing for our customers and our community?

While seemingly abstract, your company culture produces tangible results for your customers – good or bad.

Our vision at MarketCulture is to help leaders understand the importance of building a customer-obsessed culture by engaging employees (or cricketers!). Our assessment, the MRI, provides valuable feedback to help leaders act on what is vital to deliver great customer experiences, which will lead to increased business performance.

Is your company customer obsessed? MarketCulture has a unique tool that can provide the strengths and weaknesses of your customer culture against 100’s of companies like Virgin, Apple, Google, and Amazon. Mention this post for a free pilot of the MRI today!

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Posted in Customer Centric Culture, Customer Centric Leadership, Customer Centric Values, Honesty, Market Culture Inaction

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