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

Posted on December 28, 2022 by | Leave a comment

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

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

Why?

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

But it doesn’t have to be that way!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Posted on December 14, 2022 by | Leave a comment

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

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

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

Why?

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

What’s needed?

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

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

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

How do you get started?

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

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

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

Posted on November 30, 2022 by | Leave a comment

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

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

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

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

Why?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Visit us at MarketCulture to take this vital step.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Source: CXFocus

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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True customer-centricity is grounded in reality

Posted on December 22, 2021 by | Leave a comment

There is a reason the most customer-centric businesses in the world were born that way. To begin and become sustainable they were forced to be grounded in reality. They had to discover needs in the market that could be met, they had to work out how to service those needs and make a profit.

The businesses that have retained their customer-centric approaches as they have grown understood the need to remain grounded in the marketplace. Their leaders have not floated off into the ivory tower, rather they retain the pain of not delivering what they promised.

These leaders realize the work of organizations gets done at the front line and the further removed you are the larger the distance between you and reality. Hence the compelling need to empower those that are doing the work.

The best leaders don’t talk, they take action. They spend time with employees on the front line, speak with customers, put themselves in the customer’s shoes, and experience what it’s like to be a customer of their organization.

It is not complicated but it requires leadership which means consistent visible customer-centric action.

Learn more in our award-winning book, The Customer Culture Imperative.

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You can’t handle the truth – why most leaders say they want their businesses to be customer-centric but aren’t willing to take the first step

Posted on October 8, 2019 by | Leave a comment

Feel fear and do it anyway - text on napkin

Creating a new business that endures over a long time is hard. We all know the statistics; 80 % of companies fail within the first 2-3 years.

What separates the businesses that sustain from those that wither away? Customer obsession. These companies have found a problem worth solving, a need that must be filled, and customers willing to pay. It all sounds simple.

What happens when these businesses grow up?

Over time their success breeds complacency. They no longer have to fight to win every customer; customers come to them; life is good. Leaders become managers and get paid to manage things already in place. The focus becomes the numbers, and the tail begins to wag the dog.

In markets where growth is turbocharged, mistakes are brushed under the rug. “So we stuffed up for that customer. There will be another one to replace them….”

It all goes well until the music stops; the tide goes out, and companies are exposed. Suddenly new products or services start failing not because they are bad products or services but because customers have lost trust. Managers have not been paying attention to the real source of revenue and profits – loyal customers.

Things have changed, growth has stalled, reputations decline, and customers are walking away.

Time for some customer-centricity.

The time has come to take a hard look at the business, how we are operating, what needs to change. We need to shift to a more customer-centric way of doing business!

Where do we start? How do we make it happen?

Like any and every major accomplishment in human history, everything great begins with one step forward.

In this case, that step is to take a realistic view of exactly how customer-centric you are as a business. For many that small step maybe a step too far: they don’t want to know.

Feedback hurts – it can feel like a knife twisting, gauging a hole in our being. It instills fear, even panic in us. And yet it is the truth, the way we perceive things is the way they are no matter what stories we want to tell ourselves.

So why do leaders say they want their businesses to be customer-centric but are not willing to take the first step?

Fear.

Fear of failure.

Fear of exposure.

Fear that it will distract.

Fear that it cannot be sustained.

Fear that they cannot do anything to change.

So what is the antidote to all this fear?

Just do it.

A funny thing happens when you face your fears – you grow.

If you think its time to face your fears and improve your business find out more about our unique customer-centric culture assessment here

Or learn how you can transform by putting customers at the center of your operations in our MarketCulture Academy

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What we can learn from how Amazon deals with poor customer experiences

Posted on September 23, 2019 by | Leave a comment

amazon_innovation_coe_process

A true test of any company is what happens when things go wrong. Does the leadership step up to fix a problem? Is it a bandaid fix? or is it something permanent, that involves going to the root cause of a problem.

The world’s most customer centric company, Amazon has a great methodology called “Correction of Error” or COE. As Scott Brinker outlines in his article on innovating like Amazon: It has been baked into their culture and requires all leaders to ask the following questions:

  • What happened?
  • What was the impact on customers and your business?
  • What was the root cause?
  • What data do you have to support this?
  • What were the critical implications, especially security?
  • What lessons did you learn?
  • What corrective actions are you taking to prevent this from happening again?

This is a great way to ensure that Amazon continues to learn and minimizes the chance that the same problem will happen for multiple customers.

Now for a fun 60 second example from the movie “Meet the Parents” with Ben Stiller

While this is obviously a made-up example, I am sure many of us have had similar experiences of over zealous staff taking policies and procedures a little too seriously.

If you were the responsible manager, or a colleague, what would you do?

 

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Is it possible to compete with Amazon and win?

Posted on April 8, 2019 by | Leave a comment

hurbert_joly_fired_up

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

Hubert_Joly_jeff_bezos

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 Leadership, Customer-Centricity, Customer-Obsessed Culture, transparency, Trust, Uncategorized

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Which is a better approach: customer-centric, product-centric or finance-centric?

Posted on October 3, 2018 by | Leave a comment

featurecreep_cartoon

This is a great question that really comes down to a matter of the degree of emphasis put on these different approaches.

While the emphasis of some companies maybe product centric what makes those companies really successful is their balance with a customer centric approach. The best example is of course Apple, they build incredible products. At the same time they are incredibly focused on the users of those products.

The do not myopically focus on their products to the exclusion of customers, in fact they have a very strong customer obsession. This is demonstrated in their retail shopping experience, their focus on how users can get the most from their products through to the simply product line that makes it easier to determine the right product to meet a customer’s needs.

The danger is when a company becomes too product-centric and losses site of the customer experience. Products have lifecycles and lose relevance to their customer bases over time. Nokia and Blackberry have experienced this in the telecommunication market, they were thinking incrementally about product improvements and were blindsided by the way in which consumers would want to use their devices in the future.

Finance centric companies usually suffer from short-term thinking and a results orientation which can lead to great short-term results but that can catch-up to them when profits are out ahead of customer satisfaction.

Companies that do this continually lose the trust of customers and those companies find it very hard to grow organically as new products/services are often rejected by customers that have been burned in the past.

Think about a poor experience you had with a bank for example, the likelihood you are going to want to expand your relationship with that bank will diminish as a result…

Again like the product-centric company, a finance-centric company must add a balance of customer thinking to be more sustainable and successful over time.

We help companies understand how they can add the customer obsession element to how they do business, you can learn more in our MarketCulture Academy here

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