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

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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

To get the right customer culture you have to be obsessive!

Passion Fuels Innovation

If you want to be one of the best at creating a consistently great customer
experience you have to be obsessive about it. Think professional athletes, think
sustainable weight loss, think the most customer-centric companies in the world
like Amazon.

Too many companies today have their weaknesses in their customer culture
exposed – some with devastating effects for their customers, employees, and
shareholders. Consider what’s happened in the banking sector, the retail sector, and
the telecommunications industry.

The culture of companies towards customers is now exposed for what it is – both to
their customers and to non-customers. Customer reviews, unwanted publicity for
failures of service delivery as well as visual cues from its website and physical
channels now expose a company’s customer culture – or lack of it.

This can’t be fixed using band-aids. A customer-centric culture is not a bolt-on. It has
to be built-in. If your company needs to build-in a strong customer culture you will
have to be obsessive about it – just like professional athletes, sports teams, and the
world’s most successful companies.

Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon, has been obsessive about customers, since its
inception just over 20 years ago. He has made sure that everyone working at
Amazon is also obsessive about customers.

This means being obsessive about getting and acting on customer insights, giving
permission (empowerment) to employees to do what’s right for the customer,
working in collaborative teams to provide greater value for customers and aligning
everyone in your business to deliver a customer-centered strategy.

This is not some nice intangible idea anymore, we have been obsessed with developing a proven methodology with measurement and best practices that any company can use.

If you really want your organization to be customer-obsessed, learn more in our MarketCulture Academy we know the way!

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

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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.

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

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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!

Why Customer Experience fails in organizations!

Contemplating cx failure

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

How do leaders become customer-centric?

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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.

Can you continue to charge customers after they are dead?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What drives leaders to become customer-obsessed?

Mature Man Clutching Arm As Warning Of Heart Attack

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

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

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

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

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

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

Failure of Culture: Australian Cricketers do the Unthinkable.

Cricket Bowler in Action

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But, there’s an even bigger question.

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

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

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

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

A Customer-Obsessed Culture is like employee engagement on steroids

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Can you imagine a business where everyone connects with its true purpose and gives the very best of himself or herself every day to deliver on that purpose?

What an awesome place that would be to work! And wouldn’t you love to be their customer!

Unfortunately, there are only a few organizations like this in the world today. However, the good news is that many more companies are actually aspiring to be that way.

I don’t care what business you are in; you must foster a new operating model to be successful in today’s business environment.

What makes it different?

The old school autocratic, all-knowing CEO is out, the age of talented teams focused on customers is here.

We call this customer culture, an environment where teams of people work together to deliver unique, valuable customer experiences.

The evidence for the need to create this type of culture is everywhere, all around us.

Nowhere to hide.

Companies can no longer brush poor customer experiences under the carpet, there is a large and vocal customer constituency that will voice their opinions and these will influence whether or not others are interested in your products and services.

Purpose matters.

The days of people turning up for work for a paycheck then turning off is gone. If you spend more than half of your living hours working it had better be for more than just a paycheck.

More than ever before younger workers are looking for meaning in their work, why am I doing this? Where is the meaning?

Customers want to know why you do what you do.

Simon Sinek has recognized that consumers today care about why you do what you do as much as what your offer. If you are just in business to make money for shareholders, I think you will find it a tough environment to compete in. Do something to improve my life, the life of our community, the world or the environment…

Employee Engagement is not enough.

While employee engagement is important, it is simply not enough.

For organizations to succeed they need engaged employees that are directing that energy and passion towards solving problems for their customers.

In fact, we have found engaged employees are the result of good leadership (fair consistent, transparent, inspirational), a strong culture and people doing meaningful work for their customers.

You can’t make someone engaged in their work but you can create the environment (culture) where it is much more likely to happen.

Your call to action:

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 that 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.

Find out how to help your company become more customer obsessed  in our MarketCulture Academy.