Category Archives: Customer Obsession

The reason what they teach in business school is wrong and why a customer-obsessed culture is the only answer

Posted on February 20, 2018 by | Leave a comment

dirty-money

Many of today’s senior leaders were educated in an era where business school professors told them the sole purpose of a business was to create value for shareholders. This, at a time when only a few voices professed what revered thinker and writer, Peter Drucker, proposed that the purpose of a business is to create customers profitably. The two mindsets are complete opposites.

I recently watched the Netflix series: Dirty Money. It investigates three cases of big corporations where the only consideration by their senior leaders was the creation of shareholder value and their own bonuses at any cost.

Volkswagon was proven to have initiated and perpetuated (by senior leaders) built-in software to falsify carbon emissions in order to make claims about their cars to enable them to grow their business in the US with diesel-fuelled vehicles. Even when proven, senior leaders were in denial until indicted by the US government.

HSBC turned a blind eye to money laundering by the Mexican drug cartels through their banking network. Despite being castigated in US Senate investigations and regulators over a decade, there was no effective action taken and finally, the company was fined almost US $2billion with an admission to serious charges. This was a willful disregard of the consequences of their actions (or non-action) to achieve their profit goals at all costs.

Valiant Pharmaceuticals embarked on a merger and acquisition strategy to buy drug companies with unique monopoly brands as a basis for growth. Once acquired the prices of these life-saving products were hiked to levels where consumers could not pay for them – with life-threatening consequences. The CEO’s one stated aim was to create value for shareholders.

The senior leaders of all three companies gave no thought to the consequences for their customers and the community. In fact, they saw them as irrelevant. Excessive pollution from cars is a prime cause of the premature death of many consumers. Enabling money laundering financed drug lords and the associated violent deaths of innocents in Mexico and the drug habit in the US. Hiking pharmaceutical drug prices 10 or 20 fold over a short period created havoc and misery for many consumers with life-threatening illnesses. All of this because the senior leadership mindset and corporate culture were focused only on profit and their own bonuses.

I have heard this in many large businesses where people down the line tell me that the only concern of leadership is to meet profit goals at any cost. That cost is often lost jobs, unhappy and disengaged employees and frustration and disgust of customers.

Yet we know that the leaders of today’s most successful, modern large businesses have a totally different mindset. It is best illustrated by Jeff Bezos, who from day 1 at Amazon has built a culture around customer obsession and a focus on continually improving the value and experience delivered to its customers. He has never wavered from this mindset despite criticism at different times. What is the result? It is the most valuable and sustainable business on the planet – with a history of little more than 20 years.

We are starting to see this mindset in other leaders of long-established businesses. Richard Branson at Virgin is one. Paul Polman at Unilever is another. These leaders take the view that “what’s best for the customer is best for the business”. They truly believe that by creating a customer-obsessed culture in their leadership and employees they will deliver superior value to their customers and for their communities. And by so doing they will achieve long-term profitability and sustainability in their businesses as well as personal rewards and happy employees. They take a longer term and future-oriented view in their decision-making and their behavior.

This is foreign to many senior leaders and there is a lack of experience as to how to do it. In our research of more than 50 customer “obsessed” CEOs around the world and more than 300 businesses we now have a measurement tool that can create this mindset, benchmark your business against the best in the world and set out best practice steps to move you to the next level – a level that will be required for survival and success.

Leave a comment

Posted in Customer Centric Culture, Customer Centric Leadership, Customer Obsessed Culture, Customer Obsession, Customer Satisfaction, Customer-Centricity

Tagged , , , , , , ,

This is the secret to delivering powerful Customer Experiences that only a handful of CEO’s know about!

Posted on February 18, 2018 by | Leave a comment

Richard_Branson_Customer_Centricity

Why engaged customer-focused employees are vital to business success!

In today’s market, the majority of companies have very little to differentiate themselves from their competition. Their product and services are very similar if not identical. It is so easy to change to another company that it can be done in minutes or even seconds on the web. Social media can instantly let millions of people know what just took place. Customer expectations have changed and their demands are greater than ever.

Future business performance and sustainability will come down to whether or not customers continue to use your products and services or leave for an alternative supplier. It costs 7.5 times as much to gain a new customer yet the majority of companies spend their budgets on attracting new customers. What are you doing to retain your current customers?

MarketCulture’s purpose is to help companies recognize the importance of building stronger customer experiences that retain customers. We believe that inspired, engaged and empowered employees focused on customers are vital to success. It comes down to how the company delivers on its promise and ultimately it is all employees that make this happen. It takes one bad experience and you have lost a customer.

As leaders do you truly understand what your employees need in order to deliver a great customer experience? Are we telling them what to do or are we engaging them in what they believe is important? Richard Branson says that engaged and happy employees deliver superior customer experiences. Virgin enters markets where customers are dissatisfied. They quickly win a strong market share by providing great service with a touch of magic. Employees want to be part of the solution and feel that they belong. They want to be listened to and feel that their feedback contributes to the success of the business. Your employees are the ones that retain or lose your customers.

Companies today implement many tools that measure either employee engagement or customer satisfaction. They allow leaders to know whether or not they have happy/unhappy employees or satisfied/dissatisfied customers yet they rarely provide insight into how they can improve. Leaders need to understand what employees need to deliver the company’s promise and customer satisfaction.

“There are many ways to center a business. You can be competitor focused, you can be product focused, you can be technology focused, you can be business model focused, and there are more. But in my view, obsessive customer focus is by far the most protective of Day 1 vitality.” Jeff Bezos – Amazon Founder and CEO

How do we engage employees to build stronger customer experiences?

Customer experience comes down to the way your company and employees behave – whether you deliver or not on your promise. It can be as simple as responding to a customer in a timely fashion or just the tone of your voice. Amazon is now one of the biggest companies, yet they have retained a strong focus on their customer experiences even as they have grown to employ more than 300,000 people. The test of a company is not when things go well but when they don’t. Customers are looking to receive the value they paid for or they will simply try an alternative supplier. Where do you start building a stronger customer experience? You can start with the customer and find out whether or not they are satisfied but that is after the event has occurred and maybe too late. Alternatively, you can start with those that create the experience – “the employee” – and find out what they need in order to be able to deliver a great customer experience.

Steve Job’s recognized this towards the end of his time as CEO of Apple when he said:

“It’s not about me, it’s about the company and it’s about the cause. It’s not about everything being dependent on me. I have to build a culture, I have to think about a successor, I have to think about setting this thing up to do well over time. And in the end, what matters is, I want Apple to be an enduring great company and prove it didn’t need me.”

How do we do it? – It is simple. Listen to your employees, find out what is important to them, engage them, act on their feedback, empower them to solve customer problems and they will deliver better customer experiences.

MarketCulture researched 100’s of companies across the globe that exhibited both customer-centric decision-making with employees empowered to deliver great customer experiences. Some of these companies included Amazon, Google, Virgin, Apple, and Ikea.

The research revealed 8 disciplines that employees act on to deliver great customer experiences. We found these disciplines used across the entire organization including all support functions. This was not evident in companies that deliver inconsistent customer experiences.

Through both quantitative and qualitative employee feedback companies are able to act on strengths and weaknesses in order to support employees in delivering superior customer experiences.

What – A unique employee assessed customer engagement measurement tool.

Where do we start? The first step is to discover what is important to the employees in order to provide a better experience for customers. To do this we need to engage the employees and gain their feedback. The Market Responsiveness Index (MRI) is a unique assessment tool that all employees, including leaders, complete. The MRI has quantitative (scaled questions/benchmarked) as well as qualitative feedback (verbatim comments). This will identify the strengths and weaknesses of your company against companies that use best customer-centric practices. This will create change and build future business performance through the retention and growth of customers. Studies have shown that companies with Customer Centric practices outperform the others.

What is the Market Responsiveness Index (MRI)?

The MRI is a web-based employee assessment, requiring 15-20 minutes to complete, that benchmarks employee behaviors within your business against the most customer-centric companies in the world. This translates into 8 key disciplines all with a strong focus on the customer. These are Customer Insight, Customer Foresight, Competitive Insight, Competitor Foresight, Peripheral Vision, Cross Functional Collaboration, Empowerment and Strategic Alignment. Your company’s performance in these disciplines has been shown to drive future customer satisfaction, revenue growth, and profitability.

The MRI will provide key benefits to your company.

1. Momentum, Engagement and a New Mindset: It will create focus and momentum for a Customer Centricity initiative across the business and can be used to drive the embedding process.

2. Measurement: It is designed to provide the basis for benchmarking and measuring progress on those customer-focused behaviors that drive customer satisfaction, advocacy, revenue growth, profit and plans for individual managers to drive improvements.

3. Gain Insights: Hear directly from employees on the key issues holding the organization back from being more customer-centric in specific areas and across the entire business.

4. Tangibility and Communication: It makes customer culture tangible for all staff by identifying relevant activities that support business strategies. Through its methodology and measurement process, it facilitates communication of clear priorities.

5. Gain broad employee involvement: It provides staff with an opportunity for input and direct engagement in Customer Culture initiatives and a forum for agreeing with actions to be taken and a feeling that they are a key part of the journey and contributing to its success.

6. Build a common language across the Business: It also acts as a tool for ensuring staff within the business “get it” and develops a common language and behaviors from Customer Culture initiatives. It forms the basis for ongoing discussions and actions deep within each functional group which is where the ultimate success in embedding customer culture will be determined through collaboration.

7. Accountability: It provides customer-centric behaviors that can be included in the Key Performance Indicators of managers and their teams.

8. Benchmark: It provides the business with a benchmark against some of the world’s most customer-centric organizations. How do you compare with companies like Amazon, Apple, 3M, Virgin and others included in the database? The current database includes more than 300 corporations globally across B2B and B2C and several hundred business functions and units.

Interesting in starting your journey to a customer culture? Learn more here.

Leave a comment

Posted in Authenticity, Customer Advocacy, Customer Centric Culture, Customer Centric Leadership, Customer Centric Values, Customer Experience, Customer Obsessed Culture, Customer Obsession, Customer Satisfaction, Customer Service, Customer-Centricity, Empathy, Freedom, Honesty, transparency, Trust

Tagged , , , , , , , , , , ,

2 secrets of Salesforce.com’s success at attracting customers

Posted on January 17, 2013 by | Leave a comment

customerculture_at_salesforce

Jamie Greney, a long standing employee says “In my ten years at salesforce.com, I think one of the most important elements to our success has been the corporate culture. We’ve had a consistent vision regarding the end of software. Three of our top values have been trust, customer success, and innovation.”

Alyson Stone, another company employee says “Depending on how you look at it, resolving a customer’s problem is the beginning or the end of a journey. Companies who decide to put the customer at the center of all business strategies and activities are making a commitment to engagement, yes. But more than that they are making an assumption that each customer is a long-term investment with a high rate of return.”

It is clear that Salesforce’s customer culture is embedded in the business and has been central to its ongoing delivery of value to its growing customer base. Salesforce is on Fortune’s 2012 list of the 100 Best Companies to Work For ranked number 27.

In a report titled “Salesforce’s happy workforce”, David Kaplin describes what happens inside the company.

 “There are plenty of reasons Salesforce is cool to work for: its downtown San Francisco vibe, its matchless end-of-the-year revelry, its embedded philanthropy, and its idiosyncratic leader.”

He quotes Marc Benioff, the CEO, “We achieved our market position by being born cloud,” Benioff writes in his book titled Beyond the Cloud, “but we are being ‘reborn’ social … We need to transform the business conversation the same way Facebook and other social sites like Twitter have changed the consumer conversation and created incredible loyalty — and love.”

Kaplan reports that Salesforce’s new social-networking app, Chatter, functions much like a Facebook inside a company — and helps enhance office culture. Whether on a computer or mobile device, Chatter is dynamic and collaborative — e-mail, by comparison, is static and private. In open groups or news feeds like Finance or Sales, multiple employees can share ideas in real time on projects, analyze data, and compare drafts. “I learned more about my company in a few months through using Chatter than I had in the last three years,” Benioff says.

At Salesforce itself — where there are about 3,000 daily Chatter posts, and internal e-mails have decreased 30% since Chatter went live — there are groups designed to get employees across departments and rank talking to each other about work life, including Tribal Knowledge and Airing of Grievances. Kaplan says you can’t post anonymously, so complaints and queries are rather tame. But it nonetheless generates a degree of cooperation unseen at large organizations.

When you think about it, by providing business software on the web as its core mission, the collaborative model that the company has with its customers engenders cross-function collaboration within each customer as they use the Salesforce software.

Success has many elements, but there are two secrets underpinning Salesforce that stand out:

1)   A Customer Culture as noted at the start of this post, is fundamental to Salesforce’s growth and profitability.

2)   Collaboration across functions and with customers fuels trust and innovation resulting in a happy workforce and more value for customers.

How strong are these cultural attributes in your company? What could you do to strengthen them?

If you want to build this capability in your organization check out our MarketCulture Academy.

Leave a comment

Posted in C-Level Quotes on MarketCulture, Chief Customer Officers, Culture Change and Social Media, Customer Centric Culture, Customer Centric Leadership, Customer Centric Values, customer focus, Customer Insight, Customer Obsession, Customer Satisfaction, innovation, Innovative Thought, Market Culture in Action, Strategic Alignment, Trust

Tagged

Why global competition means every company must be more customer focused

Posted on December 26, 2012 by | Leave a comment

global competition requires peripheral vision

Global competition is coming to the telecommunications industry in a major way. Yes Skype and others have been around for a long time but direct competition between the telco powerhouses has been slow to evolve.

America’s largest telco, Verizon, is planning to make a push for corporate customers with its secure internet and cloud computing products in the Asia-Pacific region. This move will see it competing head-to-head with Telstra International, the overseas arm of Telstra, the largest Australian telco. Telstra chief executive, David Thodey, recently cited expansion into Asia and more multinational corporate clients as a key strategic priority for Telstra in 2013.

John Harrobin, Verizon Enterprise Solutions chief marketing officer said “We believe that we are positioned to be one of the handful of players worldwide that can serve the mission critical needs of enterprise customers,” The move into the region puts Verizon in direct competition with Telstra, which wants its international arm to sell more global data and telecommunications services to companies with offices around Asia.

Verizon also wants more business with Australian corporations. It already provides telecommunications for some Australian government departments and for companies in the financial services, mining and manufacturing industries. It is also aiming to provide cloud-computing services to medium-sized companies that have only Australian operations,

IT services are moving from an on-premise service to a cloud-based service, and this would be a “massive disruption” in the sector, he said.

For Telstra, this type of heavyweight competition is relatively new and collaboration with new partners in Asia may be necessary. Telstra’s Asian success has been mixed in the past. For Verizon, the Asian markets will pose a new challenge – they will be aiming to sell new disruptive solutions to new customers. This is much tougher and riskier than selling products that everyone understands to customers you already know.

Which company is best positioned to win this battle? Will it be Verizon with its larger infrastructure and resources or Telstra with its traditionally stronger links in Australian and Asian markets? The answer will ultimately turn on the relative strengths of their customer cultures – their understanding of current and future customer needs and the ability of their entire organizations to deliver superior value for corporate customers. Their cultures will need to be resilient enough to understand, adapt to and act on their current and future competitors’ strategies and to have sufficient “peripheral vision” of opportunities that will require product and service innovations.

Do you have a customer culture that enables you to win competitive battles of this type? Does your corporate culture have the “peripheral vision” to identify and act on early warning signals of competitive threats and disruptive market opportunities?

Leave a comment

Posted in Chief Customer Officers, Client News, Competitive Advantage, Competitor Insight, Customer Centric Leadership, customer focus, Customer Obsession, Peripheral Vision

What every company must have to be truly customer focused

Posted on August 14, 2012 by | Leave a comment

Customer Focused Leadership Strength

Many people ask me about the key ingredients to being a customer focused business and ultimately there is one answer, customer focused leadership.

If the senior leaders don’t really get it, it creates a tough environment for those employees that recognize its importance.

Customer focused leadership is not only about understanding it intellectually, which most leaders do (even the most cynical), but behaving in a way that demonstrates customer focus.

Behaving in a customer focused way means bringing the customer’s perspective into every decision. If we change the way we handle customer service what impact will this have on customers? If we increase or decrease prices how will customer perceptions change? If we invest in this IT project what impact will it have on customers? and so on.

Incorporating a customer perspective seems like a simple change to make but unfortunately many leaders pay lip service to customer impacts sending a clear message to their organizations that employees can act in the same way.

How customer focused is your leadership?

Leave a comment

Posted in Chief Customer Officers, Customer Centric Culture, Customer Centric Leadership, Customer Obsession, Customer-Centricity

6 questions on customer focus every leader must answer

Posted on August 7, 2012 by | 1 comment

Image

There has always been a lot of talk from business leaders about being customer driven, customer focused, customer centered in their business activities but what does that really mean?

Here are some key questions and answers to help leaders wanted to improve their organization’s level of customer focus:

1. Why be customer focused?

a. It pays – countless studies tell us businesses with high levels of customer focus sustain a growth path and are much more profitable

b. It’s more satisfying – a pat on the back from a customer makes the hard work all worthwhile

2. How does a customer focused business and team think?

a. It has a shared belief that “what’s best for the customer is best for the business”.

b. The customer is at the heart of all decisions – it is enacted by saying “How will this decision affect the customer; how will it benefit the customer?”

3. What do customer-focused people and teams do?

a. They get feedback from end customers and act on it

b. They get feedback from service provider partners and act on it

c. They gain insights on what bugs customers

d. They understand what will create real added value for intermediate and end customers

e. They realize that it’s the customer’s perception of what is valuable that counts, not their own view of what’s valuable

f. The biggest challenge is for us to gain a customer’s perception of what is really valuable

4. How can we measure how customer-focused we are?

a. Measure what people do in the business that affects the value delivered to customers – adding customer perceived value is a positive; doing non-value work is a negative

b. This comes down to how we behave – in relation to customers and competitors; how we collaborate with each other and our partners

5. What leads to loyal customers spending more and not considering the competition?

a. Personal relationships that create advocates

b. Consistent high value service delivery

c. Continually interacting with customers, listening for feedback, asking, customers how we are doing

d. There is great satisfaction in understanding a customer’s real need and helping them satisfy it

6. Who creates value for customers?

a. Everyone – if you are not creating value for customers, you are draining the business of its potential and future

b. The user experience is affected by everything the business delivers or does not deliver

c. Customers don’t care about your processes, they want a solution to their real problem

d. We should all be focused on solving the end user’s business problem/needs

1 Comment

Posted in Chief Customer Officers, Customer Centric Leadership, customer focus, Customer Obsession, Customer Value, Customer-Centricity, leadership

Tagged , , , , , ,

3 ways to secure senior management buy-in and use it to establish a customer-centric culture

Posted on February 23, 2012 by | 1 comment

Image from John Kotter's Great Book on the Subject of Buy-in

One of the greatest challenges for customer experience executives is gaining buy-in for investments in improving the customer experience.

Customer experience can seem like a never ending intangible problem that is too hard to deal with given the necessity to focus on driving quarterly numbers.

Unfortunately the result is like driving a car as fast as you can until its empty, at some point the car runs out of fuel and it is crisis time. For a business this means losing customers and losing the ability to attract them back to the business without significant price concession leading to lower profitability.

Creating a customer centric culture is a capability building process for the organization; it is the ongoing improvement and refinement of value for its customers.

So what does this mean for gaining buy-in? Ultimately the leadership needs to buy-in to the idea that shaping the culture in a way that is customer centric is the only way to ensure a legacy for themselves and the company. In short executives with a short-term view will never prioritize culture change as they are already thinking about their next role. Why train for a marathon when you are only running a 5k?

For those executives with a longer-term view, here are 3 ways to get buy-in

1. Link the Customer Experience Strategy to Corporate Strategy and the bottom line

The executive team and the CEO are ultimately responsible for driving profitable growth and return for investors. The corporate strategy for most firms involves growth. Where does that growth come from? Customers.

A customer experience strategy that results in customers staying with the company for longer, buying more and newer products, becoming advocates and reducing the cost to serve will drive growth. If customer experience professionals can show how the customer experience strategy will drive these things they will get executive buy-in.

2. Define the Cost of Quality

What is the impact to the organization of poor customer experience and quality?

  • Customers leave or churn
  • Customer have to call more often to have the needs met
  • Employees leave
  • Brand/image
  • Customer complaints increase demonstrating weakness in organizational performance

3. Data-Data-Data!

  • Determine the propensity to switch, which customers are at risk of leaving and what would it cost if they did?
  • Measure your company’s level of customer centricity and benchmark best in class companies.

1 Comment

Posted in Chief Customer Officers, Customer Centric Culture, Customer Centric Leadership, Customer Experience, customer focus, Customer Obsession, Marketing ROI, Metrics, ROMI

Tagged

7 ways a lack of customer centric culture destroys business growth

Posted on February 5, 2012 by | 1 comment

Don't let a lack of customer focus cost your organization

Being a business that is focused on real value for customers is often talked about by CEOs but in our experience only sincerely acted upon by a few.

Its not enough to just believe in an idea, one must act to make it happen. A key reason for this failure to act is the lack of understanding of the economics behind customer centricity.

Fundamentally customer centricity is about building a sustainable profit generating capability for the organization but there is also a downside of not acting to create this type of culture.

Here are 7 ways of calculating the cost of a lack of customer focus:

1. The CEO loses touch with the marketplace.

As businesses grow on the back of an original powerful value proposition, success can disconnect a company with the marketplace.

A recent example is Netflix’s decision to raise the price without a perceived increase in value for their customers. The result was the loss of 800,000 customers in one quarter. Let’s assume it cost them $150 per customer, (based on this great case study by Neil Patel of KISSMetrics), that was a $12 million dollar investment wiped out in one quarter. Ok so many of those customers would have contributed revenue during their time with the company but what about the impact on Netflix’s reputation? How much will it cost to attract new customers going forward $175-200?

2. Customers start leaving the minute they have a better alternative

Are your customers “hostages” to your business? Do they have alternatives and if they did would they stay?

AT&T faced this challenge recently when the iPhone was opened up to Verizon. Prior to this transition, market research firm ChangeWave, conducted a survey of AT&T customers that found 26% of them planned to switch.

It is unlikely this many customers would switch but let’s do the math. I will assume each customer is worth $2400 (based on $100 per month – 2 year contract). Assuming they have approximately 15 million iPhone subscribers, 26% represents 3.9 million. So the customers at risk are worth approximately $9.4 million over two years

3. Customers refuse to pay higher prices

Loyal, happy customers will pay more for your products and services. They feel good about doing business with you and get value from what your offer. But there is a risk of loss if you try to increase prices or even hold prices in the face of competition without increasing customer benefits.

Two companies that have experienced this recently are Best Buy and Bank of America.

Best buy are under enormous pressure from the online retailers, specifically Amazon who are turning Best Buy into a showroom for products they sell at a lower cost online. Best buy’s only way forward is to offer more value, provide service customers will pay for, create an experience that is better and keeps customers coming back. To date this strategy has been working but with some recent feedback from a blog post from CEO Brian Dunn it shows they still have a long way to go.

Bank of America recently found out the hard way that customers don’t like price increases without a perceived increase in value. Charging a customer for something they used to get for free is an emotionally charged issue. It is a violation of expectations and Bank of America ultimately had to reverse its decision to start charging a monthly fee on debit cards.

4. Negative word of mouth makes it expensive to attract new customers

Negative word of mouth used to be limited to the spoken word but with social media and the web an integral part of our lives there are multiple places to express our dissatisfaction with companies.

Given we believe what other people say about a company more than what the company says about itself, the influence of negative comments is a powerful headwind for companies trying to acquire new customers. Just ask Vonage.

Vonage had an opportunity to be the “Apple” to “Microsoft” the “Virgin Airlines” to “American Airlines” in the telecommunications world. A high value, low cost alternative to the traditional telephone companies. But since its launch it has come under fire not only for poor quality phone service but has been attacked for its aggressive marketing and poor customer service.

The bottom line is Vonage’s cost per acquired customer went up by 7% in a single quarter during 2008 –  a time when it was plagued with many of the negative word of mouth issues highlighted above. Vonage’s CEO at the time Marc Lefar said the company’s expenses to secure new customers were “not acceptable”.

5. Your best staff leave

When companies lose a focus on their customers, employees lose hope and often the best leaders look for other rising stars.

Companies like Research in Motion, HP and Kodak come to mind. When the best people leave usually their teams are quick to follow and this further exacerbates the problems.

6. Your business stops growing

Businesses that have lost customer focus and become mired with an internal or product focus stop growing. They may have a core service or product that is still in demand but they tread water not able to create new value to either attract new customers or have existing customers buy more.

An example that comes to mind is Microsoft, which has appeared to stand still for the last 10 years after a period of unprecedented growth. Microsoft is clearly still an incredibly successful and profitable business but our expectations have changed, we expect it to grow like Google or Apple or Facebook.

Here is a good article outlining the reason for Microsoft’s stagnation, essentially it is more about expectations and competition than anything else. The market does not believe Microsoft knows how to create ongoing value for its customers better than the competition.

The bottom line for Microsoft is that is has essentially stopped growing relative to its competition.

7. You go out of business

The last outcome of a lack of customer focus is business closure. When companies do not change with shifts in customer demands they fail.

Two examples that come to mind are Circuit City and Kodak.

Circuit City was caught in the middle between the online leader Amazon’s rise and the big box leader Best Buy’s aggressive expansion.

Kodak’s demise has come from a tectonic shift it was not willing to make. The writing was on the wall as soon as their original digital camera project was killed by internal fears of the impact it would have on the film business. So instead of Kodak cannibalizing its own business its competitors did.

The costs of not having a customer-focused business are immense.

As competition increases and continues to filter into every last industry across the globe; the need to have a culture that is willing to shift with the external trends is going to be crucial for survival.

 Ultimately it is the customer centric culture that will win.

1 Comment

Posted in Chief Customer Officers, Culture Change and Social Media, Customer Centric Culture, Customer Centric Leadership, Customer Experience, Customer Obsession, Customer Value, Customer-Centricity, innovation, Market Culture Inaction

Tagged

7 ways a CEO demonstrates he/she is serious about being customer centric

Posted on January 25, 2012 by | Leave a comment

One of the reasons companies struggle in their quest for enhanced levels of customer focus is employees don’t buy the fact that their leadership is serious about making the change. They are looking for signs that this is not just the flavor of the month and it to will pass soon.

Here are 7 ways you can send that message:

1. Define what a customer centric culture means to your organization. What are the values of the organization and how do these translate into how you will treat customers? Even in businesses with very thin margins there are ways to create value that allow companies to differentiate. Take Ingram Micro for example, the world’s largest distributor of computer products. Ingram Micro were the first company to provide their smaller retailers a drop ship capability where they could opt to have products ship directly to customers. This service reduced handling costs for the retailers and added significant value, which Ingram was able to capitalize on through increased market share.

2. Define a customer service charter. Have you defined how customers will be serviced? Is this approach mirrored internally? There are certain fundamentals that every customer values but not every company delivers. Speed of complaint resolution is one example, has your company considered how important this is to your customers? A print shop owner would lose a lot of money if his printer stopped working and was not able to get a fast response. However, a clothing company may have a little more time to get an issue resolved. Regardless of these differences do all employees know how critical certain service elements are to the life of their customers?

3. Measure and benchmark your current levels of customer focus. Customer focus can be measured and compared with the best. You can only manage what you can measure and this goes for culture as well. Tools such as the Market Responsiveness Index (MRI) allow companies to very simply see where they stand versus the best companies across industries and the globe.

Companies with a strong culture of customer focus outperform their competitors on a consistent ongoing basis; this culture forms the bedrock of competitive advantage. Companies like Apple, Zappos, 3M and Nordstrom have dominated their markets with an unrelenting focus on customers.

4. Evaluate your decisions in light of the message they send to customers. When you decide to increase price in order to meet revenue or profit targets for a quarter, think about what message that sends to customers and employees? Is there an equal increase in value being provided? Or will it be perceived as price gouging, taking advantage of captive customers?

5. Top 10 lists of customer insights and issues. The practice of communicating what is on customer’s minds on a regular basis across the entire organization demonstrates that customer’s and their issues are important. Great customer centric companies publish these regularly and they come straight from the top. Treating all feedback as valuable and potentially actionable is energizing. Make sure complaints are viewed as opportunities by presenting them in a “here is what we are going to do about it” fashion.

6. Appoint a Chief Customer Officer (CCO). The appointment of a customer advocate at the most senior levels of an organization demonstrates a real commitment by the CEO and executive team to make customer’s a priority. There is a small but growing number of CCOs in mid-size and large companies. This reflects the trend of leveraging an end-to-end customer experience as a way to differentiate products that are increasingly commoditized.

7. Measure everyone on customer satisfaction. Elevate customer satisfaction and other customer metrics such as lifetime value to the same level as revenue and profits. Businesses succeed when their customers succeed and yet many companies bury the customer metrics in favor of only revenue and profits. But revenue and profits are the outcome of the customer metrics. In competitive markets if you see declines in customer satisfaction, increases in customer defection and reductions in customer lifetime value, a profit decrease is sure to follow. Just ask Reed Hastings of Netflix after some recent mis-steps cost the company more than 800,000 lost customers.

In business, words are meaningless without action, if your company’s vision and mission includes some statement related to customers, what tangible actions do the leaders of the organization take to reinforce this?

Leave a comment

Posted in Chief Customer Officers, Customer Centric Culture, Customer Centric Leadership, Customer Experience, Customer Obsession

Tagged