Category Archives: Change Leadership

How do you persuade others to help you create a customer-centric culture?

Posted on September 13, 2023 by | Leave a comment

Daniel H. Pink, author of the 2012 best-selling book “To Sell Is Human” provides a great example of how to persuade others with the right questions. The example he gives is related to parenting however the method applies equally to influencing others to consider new approaches or changes such as building customer-centric cultures.

In this 4-minute video, Dan explains the concept of motivational interviewing. Specifically, this involves asking someone to rate their own readiness to start doing something you think is important. This will lead them to articulate their honest reasons for not doing it currently. From there, you can influence them to adhere to desired behavior more easily.

How does this relate to our customer culture tool? The business MRI? 

Well, this is exactly how the MRI Benchmark assessment works. It prompts self-reflection on the 8 disciplines of customer culture, where do I rate the organization high, where are we low? And what do others in the organization think about where we stand?

The MRI Benchmark asks leaders the right questions, it gets them to think about what they are doing and whether it truly is customer-centric behavior.

This creates a tension that requires action, if scores are lower than expected a natural drive kicks in to want to improve. The journey towards a more customer-centric better performing business has begun!

Importantly once a benchmark is established you can focus on what obstacles need to be overcome to build a truly customer-centric culture.

It is actually not that hard.

Check out the MRI Benchmark today for just $US1…

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Posted in Change Leadership, Customer Centric Culture, Customer Centric Leadership

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Is it possible to compete with Amazon and win?

Posted on April 8, 2019 by | Leave a comment

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For businesses everywhere, this is becoming an increasingly relevant question.

Not long ago most business could just ignore Amazon and say to themselves that’s fine for them in retail they are not operating in our industry.

Well, times are changing, and Amazon is competing in not only retail but consumer electronics, entertainment, enterprise cloud services and is eyeing opportunities in healthcare and payments.

The question for all businesses to ask themselves is how would we respond if Amazon entered my marketplace?

Well, one company did not have to wonder for too long, in fact, they have been competing with them for the past 10 plus years. With the rise of Amazon, many analysts predicted the demise of Best Buy, the US brick and mortar retailer.

So how to Best Buy fight back? They applied the same approach as Amazon – customer obsession.

In fact, under the new CEO, Hubert Joly, they undertook a transformation from a transactional retailer focused on store traffic and closing sales to one focused on building customer relationships for life.

Where does a customer-obsessed transformation start?

It begins with your customers and employees when a business is under attack as Best Buy was around 2009, a new vision and purpose for the business’s future needs to be articulated.

Joly launched a turnaround plan called “Renew Blue” in 2012 that was designed to address all critical stakeholders in the business beginning with customers.

To gain insights on what was happening at the frontlines, Joly spent a week working in a store and talking with employees. They told him the website sucked, it was slow and difficult to navigate, and the employee discount had been reduced recently by previous management. They also described how customers were “showrooming” coming in to see products then buy them somewhere else online.

Joly began with some quick wins, restoring the employee discount and taking price off the table by guaranteeing to match online prices.

This showed he was listening and more importantly acting on feedback, a critical trait for a customer-obsessed leader.

He then focused on customer experience, redoing the website, investing in search and matching Amazon on free fast shipping.

By focusing on their unique strengths, the in-store personal experience, they have been able to focus and start winning again.

Joly shifted the employee mindset by instilling a new purpose. In his words “we’re not in the business of selling products or doing transactions, we have our purpose, which is to enrich lives with the help of technology.”

“We don’t see ourselves as a bricks-and-mortar retailer. We are company obsessed about the customer and in serving them in a way that truly solves their unique problems.”

What does this mean in practice?

For Best Buy that means introducing new service offerings such as the “in-home Advisor” which involves best buy employees going to people’s homes for free and providing expert advice on how to better select, buy and install technology to enhance their lives.

A second example is “Total tech support” which involved Best buy taking ownership of any technical problem in the home and fixing it, all for $200 a year.

The third example of their innovation is a focus on aging seniors with an emphasis on helping them stay in their homes independently for longer. Through the smart deployment of technology they can detect if something is wrong and people need help, they can then intervene to make sure people get the help they need.

Customer-obsessed Leadership

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Customer-obsessed leaders don’t just say they are focused on customers they act on it and make decisions with a customer lens every day.

A great example is Best Buy’s relationship with Amazon, although fierce competitors on many fronts, they also see opportunities to collaborate and work together because it is the right thing for their customers.

“A lot of other retailers have been reluctant to sell their products. The reason we’ve sold their products is because we’re customer-driven.” says Joly.

In fact, recently Amazon chose to launch its Fire TV Smart TVs exclusively through Best Buy.

“Every management meeting we have, we don’t start with the financial results. We start with people. Then we talk about the customers, and last we talk about the financial results”

 “I don’t believe that the purpose of a company is to make money. It’s an imperative. It’s a necessity. But it’s not the purpose”

Hubert Joly

 

The turnaround strategy with its reinvigorated purpose and customer obsession around enriching people’s lives through technology are paying off. The ship has turned, and the future looks bright for this retailer once thought to be following Circuit City into bankruptcy.

How can you instill a customer-obsessed culture in your business? It starts by understanding your current culture and charting a path based on purpose, people and delivering great customer experiences.

Sources:

http://tcbmag.com/honors/articles/2018/2018-person-of-the-year-hubert-joly

https://www.cmo.com.au/article/659314/how-best-buy-shifted-from-being-retail-led-customer-relationship-driven/

 

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Posted in Authenticity, C-Level Quotes on MarketCulture, Case Study, CEOs, Change Leadership, Competitor Insight, Customer Centric Culture, Customer Centric Leadership, Customer Centric Strategy, Customer Centric Values, Customer Experience, Customer Insight, Customer Obsessed Culture, Customer Obsessed Leadership, Customer Obsession, Customer-Centricity, customer-obsession, transparency, Trust

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Amazon Founder Jeff Bezos explains how he drives a passion for customer obsession with his senior leadership teams

Posted on June 26, 2018 by | Leave a comment

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Creating a customer-obsessed culture requires strong leadership and one of the very best exponents of the practice is Jeff Bezos of Amazon.

Even though Amazon now employs more than half a million employees and serves more than 300 million customers, Jeff Bezos personally reads every customer complaint email sent to him. While he does not respond to them personally, he is immersed in them as a way to stay in touch with the reality of what is going on in the business.

We call this, customer immersion, and it is one of the most important activities any CEO can engage in.

So how does he manage the wide range of customer complaints/feedback he receives directly?

He is known to forward the email directly to the leader accountable for that area with a simple “question mark”. The question mark is his short-hand for can you look into this? why is this happening?

Leaders know they are then on the hook to drill into the issue and find out what is happening and resolve it in a systemic manner, ie so it does not occur again!

And this is the crux of what makes a customer-obsessed culture different, leadership takes this seriously and follows through on making the changes necessary so that the source of the complaint is eliminated…. this simply does not happen in most organizations.

This approach gives Bezos a frontline insight into what customers think and experience. It is a huge leadership advantage as he can maintain a pulse on what is actually going on across Amazon’s massive and complex business.

In this great article by Julie Bort, Jeff explains:

“The thing I have noticed is when the anecdotes and the data disagree, the anecdotes are usually right. There’s something wrong with the way you are measuring it.”

For 10 years MarketCulture has helped leaders around the world understand how to engage employees in building a customer-obsessed culture. The MRI Assessment provides valuable feedback to leaders they can act on to enable employees to deliver great customer experiences.

MarketCulture has proven scientifically that a stronger customer culture will drive increased business performance through retention of customers and increased advocacy.
Contact us now to find out how we can help your company become customer obsessed.

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Posted in amazon, CEOs, Change Leadership, Customer Centric Culture, Customer Centric Leadership, Customer Centric Values, Customer Communications, Customer Insight, Customer Obsessed Culture, Customer Obsession, Customer-Centricity, Empathy, Voice of the Customer

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Culture eats customer experience quick wins for breakfast – its time to get truly customer obsessed!

Posted on June 12, 2018 by | Leave a comment

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Apple’s culture continues to reinforce Steve Job’s approach to designing using a customer lens and working backward.  Source: Apple’s WWDC18

A recent article by Nadia Cameron from CMO highlighted a panel discussion in which many leaders acknowledged the quick wins for customer experience improvements are over.

It’s great to see more and more senior leaders recognizing the need to go deeper and look at organizational culture. Whilst it can be more difficult work, it is also longer lasting and more sustainable if leaders put the effort in to change the cultural emphasis towards making customer’s lives better.

So how are CMOs and other leaders looking to address culture?

One of the best examples comes from Rachael Powell, the Chief Customer and People Officer for Xero, they are taking an inside-out approach by focusing on their people and how they impact the customer’s experience.

Xero has recognized the intimate connection between how employees are treated and how they, in turn, treat customers:

“It really is about starting with our own people first who are the biggest ambassadors for our brand, winning their hearts and minds, then resonating that out to our channel, which is bookkeepers and accountants, and ultimately the end customer sitting at the end of the spectrum,” she said. “If we achieve this, we go from having 2000 ambassadors, our people, to having hundreds of thousands of ambassadors globally.”

They also appear to have a strategy for shaping their culture over time with 2 of 6 pillars sitting with Rachael: “great people and teams, and love and protect our customers”

It will be interesting to follow the Xero journey as they continue to grow!

Over the past 10 years, MarketCulture has researched 100’s of companies including Google, Virgin, Amazon, and Apple to find out what they do differently when delivering great customer experiences.

Could you create change if you knew the strengths and weaknesses of your company compared to these companies?

The MRI assessment provides the golden insights to create change! Contact us now and we will show you how!

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Posted in Authenticity, Change Leadership, Chief Customer Officers, Customer Centric Culture, Customer Centric Leadership, Customer Centric Values, Customer Communications, Customer Experience, Customer Insight, Customer Obsessed Culture, Customer Obsession, Customer-Centricity, Empathy

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How do leaders become customer-centric?

Posted on May 28, 2018 by | Leave a comment

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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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Why being customer obsessed pays! Lessons from the CEO of massively successful startup Naked Wines

Posted on April 3, 2018 by | Leave a comment

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Luke Jecks, the Former CEO of Naked Wines, founded and led an online wine business that operates in the US, the UK, and Australia. The company connects wine lovers with boutique wineries and uses a subscription model where “angels” – consumers who pay a monthly subscription to help fund the winery’s next vintage – are able to order their favorite wines and pay for them from their subscriptions. It is a customer-funded wine business.

I asked Luke how this came about.

He replied: “The most important thing in the wine industry is that the only way this online business could work would be if we could have consumers that were “sticky” to the business. If we could get loyalty in perpetuity we would not have to be a business that is constantly out there chasing new sales. Instead what we could do is invest in loyalty in the consumer and if we did that we would have a sustainable business.”

“So we needed a model that did not trap consumers but made them want to stay. So the questions we had to answer were: How do you reinvent the wine club and its benefits with a subscription that had no cancellation fees, had no minimum period of membership, you could walk away at any time, and any money you put into the subscription you got back?”

“We found that a segment of wine consumers need to see a choice, a benefit, a feeling of being in control and where they feel they can connect with the values of the business. We felt that to keep customers in the long term we needed to make them feel proud – because they mattered and were part of the key wine choices being made and understood their role in making the business a success and the winemakers successful. Also proud because they feel they are doing good through the stories behind the winemakers that can’t happen without them”.

I asked Luke how this relates to customer-centricity. He said: “To me, you must have an “attract” model and not a “trap” model. It is a model where the customer plays a vital part in the success. So it is important for us to measure the customer lifetime value – that is how long they stay with us and how much they spend. That is much more important than today’s transaction. We believe that if we can get loyalty, we will get sales. We tested this by sending “high engagement” emails to half our consumers and “buy” emails to the other half. It turned out that the “engagement” emails created loyalty and those consumers bought more. We asked our consumers to rate their happiness with us. We found that people who rated us 5 stars (90%-100%) had much bigger lifetime value. So we set about investing to get 90%+ ratings by putting more people in the business, paying our staff more, investing in career programs for our staff and empowering them to empower our customers.

I asked Luke what has been the result. He said:

“From a standing start 5 years ago Naked Wine now has more than 100,000 angels. But more important than this number is the high level of loyalty. This has created a growing, profitable and sustainable business.”

A truly customer obsessed business has loyal customers that buy from you because they want to – and stay with you because they see that you care and that they are important. It is a business, like Naked Wines, that invests in and empowers its people to fully engage with their customers to create great customer experiences. This translates into increasing customer lifetime value. Sustainable profit and growth follow.

Hear more from Luke in this previous post – “What is the kryptonite for disruptors?”

Learn more about creating this culture in our latest book, the Customer Culture Imperative.

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Posted in Authenticity, Change Leadership, Customer Centric Culture, Customer Centric Leadership, Customer Centric Values, Customer Culture and Profit Link, Customer Experience, Customer Insight, Customer Obsessed Culture, Customer Obsession, Customer Satisfaction, Customer Service, Customer-Centricity, Empathy, Freedom, Honesty, Market Culture in Action, transparency, Trust

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Customer Obsession: Its a Mindset! Here’s one senior leader’s take on it.

Posted on March 9, 2018 by | Leave a comment

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I have known and worked with John Stanhope over many years. John had a long career with Telstra culminating as CFO. He is now Chairman of Australia Post. Ever since I have known him he has had a customer mindset. Almost an obsession!

When I spoke to him about the mindset challenges in today’s business he said: “Today the focus must be on ‘customer innovation’. Many companies focus on innovation, but it is customer innovation that counts. At Australia Post our customers want their parcels anywhere, anytime, so we ask: How can we provide a great delivery process that gets better and better over time and do it profitably? Innovation must occur to meet our customer’s need and expectation of ‘anywhere, anytime’.”

He says all leaders must have a mindset that is externally and future-focused. This includes foresight and peripheral vision with future customer needs and changes in customer behaviour as central. This is what drives customer innovation.

To develop this mindset leaders must have a relentless pursuit that everything is about the customer. John says: “There are little signs that tell you. At the start of a meeting ask – Is this about our customers? If not, don’t have the meeting. Another key sign is ‘language’.  How do you frame a problem or an issue? Is it framed in terms of the customer or not?”

I asked John how you get this mindset. He says: “ There are many factors, but I think a key one is that you must immerse yourself with customers. Ask them questions, listen to what they say, observe their behavior and then put yourself in the customer’s position. If I were the customer, what would I want to solve this problem? How would I like to be treated? That applies to anyone in a business no matter what level and what function.”

In every company that is continually successful at innovation, there are leaders and employees that have a customer obsession mindset. Like Amazon, that has developed a customer-obsessed mindset and a customer culture to match, this is required for sustainable success.

The only way to future-proof your business, your leadership or your team is with a strong adaptable, innovative customer culture.

Learn more here

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Posted in Authenticity, CFOs, Change Leadership, Customer Centric Culture, Customer Centric Leadership, Customer Centric Values, Customer Communications, Honesty, innovation, Market Responsiveness Index, Trust

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This is why playing it safe is the biggest risk for legacy companies

Posted on August 5, 2017 by | Leave a comment

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Making pizzas seems like a simple business. After all its been happening for centuries and it seems like almost anyone can do it. But to make a sustainable business out of it and maintain an appealing brand in today’s competitive world requires a customer centric leadership mindset.

A starting point for Domino’s change from an ailing pizza maker in 2010 to a growing food business was a leadership change. Patrick Doyle became CEO in 2010 after Domino’s had experienced several years of stagnating business and declining share price. Doyle realized that he could only revamp the business if he could lead and create a mindset change in staff – a change from an “omission bias” where people worry more about doing something different than no change and “loss aversion” where the focus is on not losing rather than winning. I remember the great American motivational writer and speaker Zig Ziglar saying “.. the fear of loss is greater than the desire for gain”. Doyle realized that playing it safe was the riskiest course of all and he needed to create a mindset in the business that change is a necessity and a learning mentality in which for staff “failure is an option”.

A Customer-Centric Leadership Mindset was Needed to Transform Domino’s Pizzas

The change in Domino’s strategy came with a big picture view and a realization that they were not only in the pizza-making business but also in the pizza-delivery business and how this fundamentally affected the experience of their customers. This meant becoming just as much a tech company as a pizza company to transform the way customers could order and monitor the status of their order using a Domino’s app. Other apps were created to enable customers to provide feedback and become involved in games making ‘virtual’ pizzas.

Staff needed to be open to customer criticism to help them make better pizzas that customers would love eating as well as keeping them warm enough by the time of delivery. So Domino’s took on board customer views of how bad the pizzas were and suggestions on what to do to improve them.

Customers’ frank views were aired in advertising and social media and created a transparency and honesty that enhanced brand trust. Domino’s used staff in ads to describe how they had changed recipes and ingredients to make better tasting products. The company created a delivery car with one seat and a warming oven for up to 80 pizzas. It modernized its image to create more of a sense of style and a sense of humor. All of these things were needed for success. Here is 4 minute video describing what they did:

But the foundation for creating this change to a more agile, customer-responsive business came from the customer mindset brought by the new leader and embedded in the business in a way that enabled them to change and transform. As one senior leader told me recently it is the focus on the customer and their changing needs that is the motivator for leaders and staff to change!

Domino’s business results prove the point. Today, it is the second-largest pizza chain in the world, with more than 12,500 locations in more than 80 countries, and up from a share price of around $8 in 2010 to one of $215 in June 2017.

Learn more about what a customer centric culture and mindset are by reading our book, the Customer Culture Imperative.

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Posted in C-Level Quotes on MarketCulture, Case Study, CEOs, Change Leadership, Competitor Insight, Customer Centric Values, Customer Experience, customer focus, Honesty, transparency, Trust, Voice of the Customer

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Why are so many customer-centric leaders on their own?

Posted on February 23, 2017 by | Leave a comment

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Many customer centric leaders we have spoken with are facing challenges they did not expect. While they themselves understand the imperative for a customer culture that will drive future business performance and sustainability and act as role models in leading the business in this way, so often they feel alone and frustrated at the top. Despite their best efforts their leaders don’t see it in the same way.

Why? Because their direct reports are still operating with a functional mindset. Or they see proposed initiatives to strengthen the culture to improve customer experience as extra work they don’t have the time for. Or they don’t understand what it means to be a customer-centric leader and why it is critical in today’s disruptive business environment. And this is spiraled down to middle management and to the people who report to them.

This is perpetuated by managers’ KPIs that are primarily functionally focused. This creates silos, lack of collaboration and lack of effective support for organization-wide initiatives.

This is not solved by ad hoc efforts to get people on board.

It requires a commitment to an organization-wide initiative that measures and benchmarks the current level of customer-centricity and engages leaders at all levels for the their inputs. It requires the development of a customer-centric strategy designed to align people with purpose and job relevance that connects the value they deliver to the customer. It needs to create a focus on easy to understand, credible and robust organization-wide customer metrics that everyone can buy in to. This needs to be part of an implementation roadmap of digestible steps that inspire people to participate in and carry through.

Above all, this must be tangible, meaningful and actionable.

Often the hardest part for a senior leader feeling all alone and frustrated by his or her team members that don’t ‘get it’ is to make a start.

The best place to start is to get a tangible benchmark of where we stand today as a business against the most customer-centric organizations in the world. This assessment involves the participation of all leaders and places a mirror to our business. The Market Responsiveness IndexTM (MRI) is a powerful tool to help you get your team on board. It is an assessment tool that will show you that you are not alone – in fact there are many others in different parts of your business and at different levels that think just like you do.

And they, just like you, want to make a difference that counts.

Build this capability in your organization check out our MarketCulture Academy.

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Posted in Change Leadership, Customer Centric Culture, Customer Centric Leadership, Employee Engagement, leadership, Market Responsiveness Index

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How to create a customer centric transformation – Lessons from Air New Zealand

Posted on February 10, 2016 by | Leave a comment

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A little more than a decade ago Air New Zealand posted the largest corporate loss in New Zealand corporate history. Inside 24 months it was turned around to a profit. Since that time it has been amongst the consistently highest profitability of full-service airlines around the world.

The catalyst for this change was Sir Ralph Norris, who was called in as CEO to transform the business. Sir Ralph’s customer-centric leadership and customer focused strategy was embodied in the mindset change from “we fly planes” to “we fly people”. He immediately engaged the top 800 leaders in Air NZ to think about, discuss and act on insights from customer feedback and observation that told them about what customers valued and what they hated about the flying experience.

His legacy, established over several years as CEO of the airline, has been continued by the current CEO, Christopher Luxon. You can see it when you fly with Air NZ – even the safety announcements are engaging as they feature some of New Zealand’s star rugby players, spectacular scenes of the country and references to some famous movies made in the country….

This is a testament to the sustained revenue and profit that can be generated by a culture and strategy embedded in the belief that “what’s best for the customer is best for the business.”

See The Customer Culture Imperative for a roadmap on how businesses like Air New Zealand have done it.

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Posted in Change Leadership, Customer Centric Culture, Customer Centric Leadership, Customer Experience, customer focus, Customer Insight, Customer-Centricity, Market Culture in Action, Strategic Alignment

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