Category Archives: C-Level Quotes on MarketCulture

Are customers at the heart of your business? Here’s what that means to Virgin

Customers at the Heart of Business

Image Source: http://www.customerattheheart.co.uk/

In a recent British Parliamentary Enquiry into the awarding of rail franchises to private companies, Richard Branson said: “Our customers are at the heart of our business”.

What does this really mean from a practical point of view to the Virgin Group? Well, as an example Virgin Mobile recently asked its Australian customers to nominate themselves to be part of a Virgin Tester Team. The successful Tester Team participants are sent the latest handset to test drive and asked them to review the phone model’s advantages and disadvantages via a two minute video. This is uploaded to Virgin’s YouTube page and the Tester’s own social media channels. Then they get to keep the handset.

This initiative is based on two bits of customer insight:

1)   Online consumer reviews are the second most trusted source of product information, only behind referrals received from family and friends.

2)   The growing trend on YouTube for users to upload videos of themselves , share them with friends showing the moment of newly purchased technology products.

This is an example of taking customers into the heart of your business based on customer insight and good business sense. By asking real people to review handsets openly potential customers are getting a fair and honest review by everyday people, not just the technology pros. It enables Virgin Mobile to obtain rapid and meaningful feedback from customers that it can use to continually improve the customer experience.

How can you bring customers into the heart of your operations?

Do your customers inspire you? How Virgin Rail was saved by its customers

inspired by customers

Sometimes our customers inspire us to great heights. 

Recently Richard Branson’s Virgin Trains created a major bureaucratic turnaround by sheer force of will and the inspiration of their customers.

On September 10th 2012, Richard Branson and his CEO of Virgin Rail, Tony Collins, were answering questions at a Parliamentary Enquiry in London initiated by Branson. This was about the awarding of the West Coast train franchise (London to Glasgow) to a competitor, FirstGroup – a franchise that had been held by Virgin Trains for the previous fifteen years.

Branson said: “We submitted a strong and deliverable bid based on improving the customers’ experience through increased investment and innovation.”

He added: “Our team has transformed the West Coast line over the last 15 years from a heavily loss-making operation to one that will return the taxpayer billions in years to come.”

Branson, who had considered abandoning the rail industry in Britain after this 4th unsuccessful bid (second each time), decided to put up a fight this time. It was not because of the money – he has plenty of that – it was because of the customers and the staff of Virgin Rail.

Buoyed by 170,000 passenger signatories to an e-petition supporting the company, rallying support from unions and staff, he decided to press the government for an investigation into the transport franchise tendering process and how decisions were made.

When asked on 10th September by a member of the Parliamentary Inquiry why he was objecting, he said: “The customer is the heart of our business”. He went on to say that customers and staff had given overwhelming support to him and the CEO, Tony Collins, and he did not want to let them down. The growth of over 10% per annum in passenger numbers over the previous 10 years was testimony to the customer appeal and quality of the service provided.

The parliamentary Enquiry overturned the decision to award the franchise to the competitor, citing irregularities and lack of transparency in the bid decision.

Here is a man who believes that the most important thing in business is to have satisfied customers and fully engaged, happy staff around a customer culture that delivers increasing value to all stakeholders – and he has proved it in Virgin Rail and other Virgin businesses.

This only happens when your customer culture is so strong that your customers not only like your products and services, but they love you and your organization. When the going gets tough, your customers will “go in to bat for you”.

Would your customers help save your business?

12 Lessons from a CFO that created a Customer Culture in the finance function

Culture Transformation

In my last blog post I described the customer transformation experience of the Finance & Administration support function in Telstra, a $25 billion Australian telecommunications company. Their CFO developed and implemented a vision of a “value service culture” (known as VSC) in which leaders and individuals viewed their stakeholders as customers and found ways of increasing the value (actual and perceived) they delivered to them. This transformation created a $15 million bottom line impact

In this post I summarize their 12 key learnings from this transformation.

  1. The senior leaders’ passion, ‘walking the talk’, ongoing monitoring and follow-through is critical to success
  2. Initially there is need for a Customer Engagement Council that guides the culture change. It works best if it is relatively small (5-8 members), has a mix of senior leaders and opinion leaders and focuses on overall planning and key initiatives. As embedding of new behaviors occur and support systems are implemented there is less need for such a group as responsibility is spread throughout the organization.
  3. Linking a culture change to a long term corporate or business strategy creates relevance and reduces perception that it is a fad.
  4. A set of guiding principles that reflect an emphasis on corporate values such as empathy and transparency is important in changing mindsets to embrace customer needs. It is necessary to continually emphasize these principles with practical examples to create the new cultural norms.
  5. Creating an emotional connection to the culture change and acceptance of a logical reason for urgency to change takes time in a large group. Creating a sense of fun, competition and reporting of “wins” in the short term can accelerate the diffusion.
  6. For Corporate Support groups that have limited experience in thinking about what they deliver from the customer’s perspective and lack a mindset related to delivering perceived value, the launch phase should provide concrete guidelines at the outset. A comprehensive communication strategy that continually provides examples of the new desired activities usually needs dedicated resources and focus to provide clarity.leading_culture_transformation
  7. Collaborating across lines of business can speed the desired cultural change across an organization. In disparate functions it takes time to find common ground for sharing. An initiative like VSC creates the common ground. Cross-fertilization of best practices makes the cultural change more exciting and effective and demonstrates to new staff the relevance and scope of the customer responsive culture. It also promotes collaboration and innovation.
  8. A clear framework and measurement toolsare vital to guide improvements and reinforce desired behaviors. These include:
    1. Customer culture measurement as a starting benchmark, then for tracking culture improvements
    2. Customer satisfaction metrics that point to areas that need improvement
    3. Customer focus behavior norms incorporated in manager and staff reviews and their key performance indicators.
  9. Technical people who have little experience in treating colleagues as customers will require a set of new tangible skills as well as an emotional connection that sees personal value in doing things differently. The emotional connection is essential for people to take “ownership” of the customer’s problem and follow through with a solution.
  10. Well structured workshops are valuable to alter mindsets and provide skills. These should be implemented as early as possible to provide immediate ‘how to’ concreteness to the desired change in behavior. Workshop attendees who represented all lines of business and all levels were generally inspired by the VSC initiative. Train-the-trainer follow-on enabled them to reinforce their skills, train others and leverage the benefits for the wider group. Also, management workshops to evaluate their own VSC behaviors as role models were useful in presenting a common picture of VSC across the entire group.
  11. People at all levels need to understand that behavior change is difficult. It takes more time than expected to embed new behaviors in an organization, particularly those that require new skills as well as a new mindset. A strong ‘command and control’ hierarchy is present in many corporate support functions because of compliance requirements. It takes substantial and continued effort to break the “police” mindset to enable people to take customer initiatives freely and without fear. Initiatives emanatingfrom the lower levels in the organization need to be encouraged, nurtured and reported.
  12. Culture change can be effected more rapidly in smaller groups, particularly roles that are consultative and rely less on systems that may be unaligned to customer needs. This means that in large groups, the new culture mindset, skills and processes must be effectively taken into all of the small sub-groups as quickly as possible to have the greatest chance of making them stick.

A culture change that produces a customer responsive organization makes culture one of the most valuable assets of a business. It is a organizational capability that can and should be measured and the profit impacts assessed. The end result of this VSC transformation was annualized savings and benefits of $15 million after an 18-month period. These benefits increased as the customer culture became more embedded.

Interested to find out more about how to measure and manage a customer culture? Visit our resources page here.

How CFOs can use a customer culture to deliver $15m to the bottom line!

Internal Customer Culture

A lot of the discussion about building a more customer focused organization centers on the customer facing parts of a business. While there is no doubt major improvements can be driven by sales, marketing and customer service, the real turbo boost to organizational performance comes from support functions that creates a culture around their internal customers.

“If your not serving customers make sure you are serving someone that does”

 Corporate Support functions like Finance, IT and Operations have the potential for releasing huge gains to the business in terms of cost savings and profit improvement. How? By developing a culture where they see their internal stakeholders – that is those to whom they provide their services – as customers.

When they develop a “customer” mindset they think about the value (or lack of) they are providing. They stop delivering reports or services that have no value to their customers and focus on things that will increase value.

John Stanhope, CFO of Telstra, a $25 billion Australian telecommunications business set out to transform his Finance & Administration Group of 2500 people into a support group that would create new value, provide top service and be seen to be valuable by its customers. He painted a vision of what he called a “Value Service Culture” (known as VSC) in which he wanted all his staff to identify their internal (to Telstra) customers and deliver services of value to them. This journey from 2008 to 2012 was an outstanding success.

“We have delivered $15 million per annum in recurring gains from stopping non-value services and activities while creating more value in those services that were needed by our customers. This translates to an additional $55 million added to the value of our business.” – John Stanhope, CFO, Telstra Corporation, 2012.

An investigation by Telstra’s Finance & Administration group of estimated gains and savings conducted in 2010 showed annualized gains and cost savings of $15 million for 2009 representing added value to the business of $55 million.

These gains were derived from analysis of specific initiatives by:

a)    Credit Management acting to collaborate with Telstra customers to reduce bad debts, cost savings from less follow-up calls and longer customer retention periods.

b)   Risk Management & Assurance collaborating with internal customers through an education initiative clarifying compliance requirements and streamlined processes for reducing work for both parties. Cost savings from labor savings.

c)    Corporate Security and Investigations working with Telstra retail shops to provide better processes, follow-up and liaison with those shops most targeted by consumer fraud. Reduction of fraud yielded large cost savings.

d)   All finance and administration groups engaged in activities to reduce duplication and eliminate non value-add activities and reports resulting in measurable savings.

Care was taken to attribute only those gains and savings that could be aligned with VSC initiatives to do with understanding customer needs, providing greater value for customers, monitoring customer feedback and collaborating with customers to deliver the Group’s fiduciary responsibilities more efficiently. Later analysis showed these gains were continued over 2010 to 2012.

Stay tuned for my next blog post in which I will summarize the actions vital to Telstra’s VSC success and the lessons learned from this transformation experience.

4 simple practices to build a customer culture in your company

This is a great short video interview with Tony Hsieh of Zappos discussing how the concept of culture and customers come together. Also thanks to Robert Reiss, host of The CEO TV Show.

The intersection of customers and corporate culture

The culture of an organization dictates how it will view customers and how it will treat them.

If everyone is expected to understand who customers are and what they value, then people naturally start doing this. Culture is a form of social pressure, it is the way you are expected to behave in a group environment, hence it is a very powerful way for leaders to create an environment of success.

Customer culture specifically looks at how much attention is being placed on bring the customer viewpoint into all decision making. It is a proven way to drive better business results as it ensures the business is aligned with its market.

Here are some great customer culture building practices that you can begin today regardless of the role you play in your company:

1. Put Customers on the Agenda

A great habit that gets everyone thinking is to start every meeting with a customer insight. Share one piece of feedback you’ve collected, one idea you have heard directly from a customer. These insights and stories can come from anywhere in the company. It does not have to be a deep conversation – just a way to get in the habit of brining the customer viewpoint inside before getting on with the rest of the meeting’s agenda.

2. Building Customer Empathy

Have someone share their own recent customer experience. Was it a positive one? What made it positive? Why did it stand out in their mind? How does it affect the way they think about that company and would it influence whether that would continue doing business with them? What does it mean for your company?

This simple exercise is a great way to build customer empathy in the team. By thinking like a customer you can make changes that will drive increases in value.

Steve Jobs and his leadership team conducted a similar exercise and recognized how dissatisfied they all were with their mobile phones. In their experience, phone’s were difficult to navigate, complex and basically not user friendly. This created the drive and inspiration to develop the iPhone.

3. Encourage Leaders to Share Customer Stories

Create a regular opportunity for senior executives to report on what they learn from their own conversations and interactions with customers.

There maybe extra leg work to translate what they heard into a useable insight, but it will be well worth the effort.

4. A Top Successes/Frustrations Customer Conversations Report

Create an ongoing forum for people to share what customers are saying in the form of a communication piece to the whole company. It should be in story form but can include statistics on key customer metrics ie things that are important to customers that your company helps them achieve. For example LinkedIn tracks how many new connections it helped people create on its professional networking site each day.

It should also include the top frustrations customers have when doing business with you. This highlights to everyone the priorities in terms of maintaining and improving customer satisfaction levels.

We have lots of FREE tools, templates and elearning modules to help build your customer culture here

What other practices do you use to drive a great level of focus on customers?

How Hawaiian Airlines has built a Customer Culture

Hawaiian Airlines Customer Focused Culture

Hawaiian Airlines – Customer Focused Culture

Charles Nardello, the SVP of Operations at Hawaiian Airlines, recently wrote about how they were able to drive improvement in the key metrics important to airline customers.

Hawaiian are now routinely ranked first by the US Department of Transportation among all airlines for on-time performance and fewest cancellations as well as garnering top marks for best baggage handling and fewest customer complaints.

How did Hawaiian achieve these outcomes? By creating a customer culture based on 3 strategies:

1) Really understanding the Hawaiian travel customer

2) Benchmarking Hawaiian on customer “moments of truth” regularly

3) Empowering Hawaiian employees to handle unexpected situations

Knowing your Customer

Hawaiian Airlines is infused with a customer focused culture that permeates everything.

“For every decision we make, from the most basic to the complex, the customer always comes first—they are the driver of our decision-making and strategic planning,” – Charles Nardello

A culture that brings the customer perspective to every decision acts very differently than a company where customers are an afterthought or are only considered when reacting to customer problems. At every level of the organization, whether deciding on which cutlery to use in the cabin or which markets to fly to, a deep understanding of the customers they serve and the experience they want to create drives the decision.

Benchmarking and Embracing Complaints

In order to benchmark, Hawaiian Airlines surveys customers every month on their experiences with the airline and factors the results into every employee’s bonus pay.

“Every employee receives a scorecard rating them on how well they’ve performed in interacting directly with the customer or, in the case of senior executives, on decision-making and strategic planning.” – Charles Nardello

It’s an approach that guarantees that everyone at the airline will remain focused on the customer. In particular they are focused on the key moments of truth that drive the most value for their customers. This includes check-in, boarding, the flight itself, baggage retrieval and how customers are treated via each stage of their journey.

The airline reinforces this customer focus via a streaming news ticker that runs on the lower part of computer screens and TVs  in break rooms and crew lounges. The ticker show unedited, unfiltered, real-time customer reaction via social media.

Nardello suggests that he is grateful for complaints as it provides the opportunity to do something immediately to improve.

Unfortunately most customer’s don’t complain they just leave and the company wonders what happened. In fact customers are more likely to complain to someone else about the experience than the company directly. This creates even more of challenge for a company to win them back.

If a reaction is negative, the airline addresses it immediately. As Nardello points out, “Our speed in addressing the problem could make the difference between retaining that customer for future flights or losing him or her forever.”

Empowered Employees

No company can prepare for every situation  that can trigger customer dissatisfaction, which is why those that excel at customer service train and empower their frontline employees to solve problems on the fly.

“We believe employees perform best when empowered to improvise and bring unmatched service to their customers in a sincere, personal way.”

This strategy has served Hawaiian well as it continues to be ranked among the very best airlines in North America. It was recently ranked 3rd most profitable on a pre-tax margin basis behind two other airlines know for high levels of customer focus – Alaskan Air and Southwest Airlines.

4 ways customer centric leaders demonstrate they care

Customer Centric CEOs

It is a well known fact in the marketing world that many customers decide to do business with other organizations simply because they believed the company did not care about their business. It’s a feeling, not a product characteristic or benefit deficiency that can often drive customers away. On a purely rationale level it makes no sense, they got what they paid for, why not continue doing business with the same company?

This same concept undoubtedly applies to the leadership of customer centric organizations. Leaders that really care about their employees and their customers demonstrate this through their actions.

Some great lessons come from Rick Silva, the CEO of a quick service restaurant chain called Checkers and Rally. Based primarily on the East Coast and South of the United States the chain first came to my attention through the show “Undercover Boss”.

CEO of Checkers and Rally's rick silva in "Undercover Boss"

Lesson 1: DEMONSTRATE you actually CARE.

“People are our most important asset” is a cliche often used by many leaders but it is not usually followed up with specifics. If people are your most important asset what are you doing to demonstrate that? What culture have you created, are people respected for the value they bring? Is collaboration seen as an important capability that is role modelled from the top?

Rick Silva was undercover at one of his 200 restaurants when he observed the manager of the store barking orders at staff, the environment was tense, one based on fear rather than hope. Rick could tell pretty quickly the culture in that store was toxic. He decided to shut the store down then and there.

Lesson 2: If its NOT GOOD ENOUGH for CUSTOMERs stop doing it and GET IT RIGHT!

The other side of the story is the impact on customers, Rick could see the results first hand of a poor store environment. In his case this meant slow service, poor quality food and lack luster customer interactions. Basically in the quick service restaurant business if staff don’t want to be there eventually customers won’t want to be there either.

Lesson 3: Give your employees WHAT THEY NEED TO BE SUCCESSFUL.

The next day Rick visited a new store, one with a high energy customer focused manager. She would go out of her way to make sure customers were happy but was hamstrung by something as simple as an intercom system that actually worked. It was almost impossible to hear the orders from customers on the intercom, something Rick experienced first hand while working to drive through ordering system.

Lesson 4: PEOPLE WANT TO BE HEARD.

Be brave enough to solicit and act on feedback. Many leaders are afraid to get honest feedback from employees, they don’t want to open a “can of worms” or distract them from their work. The reality is employees want to be heard by their leadership. Our company conducts many internal surveys and interviews as part of our consulting practice and it is amazing to see the participation rates and length of open ended responses we often receive.

Rick Silva in “Undercover Boss” was told by one of his employees that staff on the shop floor should participate and be rewarded for a job well done in the same way managers were recognized. Rick listened, recognized that the need made sense for employees and the business and took action to build an incentive program for all employees.

Are you willing to listen and take action?

Customer centric leadership – how to paint a vision that inspires action

interbike customer centric leadership

I have been fortunate enough to indulge one of my passions this week, attending the world’s largest bicycle industry show in Las Vegas, Interbike 2012.

This morning for the first time in 32 years they held an industry briefing that was keynoted by John Burke, the president of Trek Bicycle Corp. Trek is an industry leader with more than $800 million in sales and more than 1800 employees. The firm was founded by John’s father, Richard, more than 30 years ago.

However the keynote had nothing to do with Trek, in fact the company’s name was not mentioned once. Rather it was a rallying cry designed to inspire an industry to action.

John began with the good news, the industry is growing with revenues of more than $4.5 billion in 2012. More people are riding bikes more often and the infrastructure around cities in the US has undergone major investments and upgrades over the past decade. But at the same time government funding for new investments in infrastructure have been cut and only 1% of the US population use bikes as a form of transport compared to the world’s leader, Holland with 26%.

John focused on the barriers facing customers to increased participation in what is an activity that addresses the major issues of the day – health and the environment. Specifically it is an infrastructure and safety issue. Most people do not want to share the roads with SUVs, trucks and cars they want safe bike paths that actually take them somewhere they want to go.

John specifically called out the low levels of participation by industry members in advocacy activities design to influence public policy and perceptions and source funding for new projects. Less than 20% of manufacturers, dealers and employees are members of the main bicycling advocacy group Bikes Belong.

Lance Armstrong and John Burke

John Burke with Lance Armstrong a strong Trek Supporter and Sponsored Rider

Today’s keynote was a call to action for the industry to work together to grow the market. With some simple math John showed the impact of small increases in cycling engagement. If the industry could grow participation to 2% it would be a $7.5 billion industry by 2025.

The big hairy audacious goal (BHAG) however was to grow participation to 5% of the US population (remember Holland is 26% and many european countries above 10%) this would result in a $12 billion + industry size by 2025!

At the conclusion of his talk John mentioned there were 4749 days until the year 2025. He brought out two large jars one full of beans and the other empty. From day onwards he would move one bean from one jar to the other everyday to remind himself to be doing something towards fulfilling this industry goal and encouraged everyone in the room to do the same.

He received a passion filled standing ovation. Now that is Customer centric leadership at the industry level!

Does Facebook have a customer culture? Absolutely!

Facebook's Customer Focused CEO

With Facebook in the business news for all the wrong reasons, a cratering share price, slowing user growth and so on it is useful to think about exactly what type of culture Mark Zuckerberg has created.

In a recent letter to shareholders he made his position clear:

“Facebook was not originally created to be a company. It was built to accomplish a social mission — to make the world more open and connected.”

This is an inspiring larger than life vision, its not about making money, its about something that will motivate employees everyday they come to work.

Most great people care primarily about building and being a part of great things, but they also want to make money. Through the process of building a team — and also building a developer community, advertising market and investor base — I’ve developed a deep appreciation for how building a strong company with a strong economic engine and strong growth can be the best way to align many people to solve important problems.

Simply put: we don’t build services to make money; we make money to build better services. And we think this is a good way to build something.

This last sentence is particularly telling for me. This is the essence of a customer culture. It starts with creating value, creating services that solve problems for people. If you can do this well then money should follow as a result of creating value people will pay for.

By focusing on our mission and building great services, we believe we will create the most value for our shareholders and partners over the long term — and this in turn will enable us to keep attracting the best people and building more great services.

Here is the long term perspective I mentioned in my previous post. By not taking short cuts to boost short term profitability Facebook can take a balanced approach to investing in people, customers and provide returns for investors over time.

Although Facebook are currently not in our Market Responsiveness Index (MRI) database, I would expect them to be strong in all 7 of the customer culture disciplines we measure.

Its current challenges are the short term pain associated with becoming a public company. If it remains focused on creating maximum value for customers it will continue to be relevant and profitably long into the future.

For a great analysis of the full letter read Henry Blodget‘s article here

What’s your take on the Facebook culture?

CMOs Give Out Poor Grades for Market Centricity

Our partners at the CMO Council just released a report on the level of market centricity of their organizations and it is clear there is a lot of work to do in this area. See the message from Donovan Neale-May, the Executive Director below:

“How do you rate the state of customer and market responsiveness at your company? For CMO Council members who have taken the “Market Sense-Ability Audit,” the combined grade is a “D” or worse. CMO Council members express serious reservations about the level of both customer and competitive readiness in their organizations.

Make sure to read this new paper analyzing the responses of senior marketers who participated in an audit that is used by many companies to benchmark market- and customer-centricity across their organizations.
Visit our Market Sense-Ability Center to download the report, and learn how other senior marketers grade their companies’ performance.”