Tag Archives: customer culture

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

Posted on September 13, 2023 by | Leave a comment

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It is actually not that hard.

Check out the MRI Benchmark today for just $US1…

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

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How to go from “Good to Great” Customer Centricity

Posted on September 6, 2023 by | Leave a comment
good_to_great

The image above sits on my desk in my home office as a source of inspiration. It is a simple note from one of my favorite business authors, Jim Collins, responding to an unsolicited copy of our book, The Customer Culture Imperative. It is a testament to Jim how gracious he was to even respond, not having ever met nor heard of our work, yet he took the time to pen a handwritten note of encouragement, truly the behavior of a level 5 leader!

Hence the title of this post: going from good to great customer centricity!

Are you looking to make the jump from good customer centricity to great? You’re not alone – business leaders and customer experience professionals alike are recognizing that staying one step ahead of customers’ changing needs is essential for long-term success. While many organizations know they need to focus on putting their customers front and center, knowing where to start can be a challenge.

In this post, we’ll explore some key strategies for making the leap from good customer centricity to great. We’ll cover how data-driven customer insights can help organizations better understand their customers by listening to their own employees and identifying areas in which their products and services could be improved, as well as look at tactical ideas for delivering truly personalized experiences.

Read on for more on transforming your organization into a truly customer-centric powerhouse!

Customer-Centric Mindsets:
Understand Your Customers – Know what makes them tick and determine the best way to reach out to them

Customer centricity begins with a mindset, one in which all leaders (regardless of function) and employees begin by viewing the world through the customer’s eyes. Understanding your customers is fundamental to achieving success. Gaining insight into their needs and preferences, and how best to reach out to them is key. Customer insights can help you understand who your customers are and why they buy, while customer foresight will allow you to anticipate what products or services could be in demand in the future. This information can help you create relevant content that speaks to the needs of your customers, allowing you to effectively communicate with them through the channels that make sense for your business.

Develop a Customer-Focused Value Proposition – Create an attractive offer that is tailored to their needs and interests

Developing a value proposition tailored to customer needs is crucial for any successful business. It should accurately reflect the benefits that customers will gain from engaging with your brand and how it provides more than what competitors can offer. Doing proper research to understand their buying habits, interests and preferences is key to crafting an attractive offer that will make them take notice.

Listening to employees who engage with customers regularly is an immediate source of data that many organizations miss. Those on the front lines interacting with customers regularly get a good feel for what customers value and the things they don’t like about doing business with your organization. Start by listening to them and engaging them in developing and refining your value propositions.

Additionally, having a clearly defined target audience and knowing exactly who the value proposition should be aimed at is also important in order to ensure it resonates with potential customers. Taking these steps will help create an effective customer-focused value proposition that has the best chance of persuading customers to embrace your brand.

Make it easy for customers – Leverage technology to streamline communication processes with customers

Automation tools provide a great way to quickly and efficiently streamline communication processes with customers. By using such automated software, businesses can automate mundane customer service tasks such as answering frequently asked questions and confirming order details. This type of automation not only reduces the time spent on mundane tasks but also allows the customer service representative to spend more time interacting with customers in meaningful ways that build better relationships.

Focus on Personalization – Utilize data analysis to tailor messages, content, and products to individual customers

Utilizing data analysis to customize messages, content, and products for each individual customer is an increasingly effective way to provide excellent service to customers. It can help businesses ascertain the wants and needs of each customer, allowing them to present tailored suggestions and offers that are much more relevant. Moreover, it sets a company apart in terms of its reputation for catering to individuals over large masses. Using data analysis additionally helps optimize the overall user experience with targeted messaging, personalized recommendations, and clever segmentation.

Monitor Feedback Regularly – Keep track of customer sentiment and adjust your approach accordingly

In a digital age, it is imperative to stay in tune with customer sentiment. By monitoring feedback regularly, businesses can adjust their approach to meet customer needs, shifting any negative sentiment towards branding or product offerings to positive. Doing so not only cultivates greater brand loyalty but also provides an accurate reflection of your business’s success or potential mistakes made. Listening closely to feedback can allow businesses to avoid potential pitfalls and instead move forward stronger and better than ever before.

Invest in Customer “Mindset” Capabilities – Empower customer-facing AND internally facing staff with the right skill sets and tools for success

Investing in customer “mindset” training is an essential component of providing your customers with the best possible experience. Employees who are enabled and encouraged to put the “customer lens” on regardless of their role add immense value to customer and colleague interactions. Investing in a comprehensive training program for those not only on the frontlines of customer service but also those who provide internal services translates into more productivity, improved customer care, and most importantly adds to the overall success of your business.

Understanding and unlocking the potential of effectively engaging with your customers is key to growing your business. By getting to know them, crafting an attractive value proposition, utilizing automation tools, and monitoring customer feedback, you can constantly adjust your approach towards customers in a manner that is tailored according to their needs. Additionally, investing in customer service training is a great way to ensure your team is equipped with the right skill sets and knowledge for success. When it comes down to it, strong customer engagement requires consistent effort, attention, and experimentation.

How many of these activities does your organization embrace? Are your employees on board?

Find out easily and go from “good to great” by measuring your level of customer centricity. Utilizing the Market Responsiveness Index (MRI) is a great way to measure just how customer-centric your organization really is as well as identify areas of improvement.

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Posted in Customer Centric Leadership

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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!

Ready to take your customer centricity to the next level? Don’t miss out on value insights that can help you improve customer centricity. Visit MRI Benchmark!

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Posted in Customer Centric Strategy

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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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Posted in Customer Centric Leadership

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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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Posted in Customer Centric Culture, Customer Centric Leadership, Market Responsiveness Index

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Why intensity and metrics matter when reshaping an organization’s culture: Lessons from Wells Fargo

Posted on May 13, 2019 by | Leave a comment

tim_sloan_in_front_of_congress

Wells Fargo’s challenges over the past few years have been well documented. It took a turn for the worse when it created an aggressive sales culture based on unrealistic targets.

To meet sales targets, employees opened accounts customers did not need, ordered credit cards without their permission and even forged customer signatures on paperwork.

The result was the creation of 3.5 million fake customer accounts many of which were then billed fees. Further investigations produced evidence that 570,000 customers had been sold car insurance they didn’t need.

These were failures of culture, leadership and ultimately risk management practices, something the bank had prided itself on during the mortgage crisis of 2008.

In 2017, the Institutional Shareholder Services (ISS), an influential shareholder advisory group released the following statement:

“The board failed to implement an effective risk-management oversight process in a timely way and that could have mitigated the harm to its customers, its employees and the bank’s reputation.”

It also suggested shareholders vote against the re-election of 12 of the 15 directors.

Most of the board was replaced over the next 12 months and Tim Sloan, the new CEO was tasked with cleaning up the mess.

To his credit, he did a lot of work with his top team to reshape the vision, values, and goals around the core idea of “helping customers succeed financially”. He also began to signal a shift in leadership focus away from shareholders:

“When you put your shareholders first—I hope Warren Buffett isn’t listening by the way—but when you put them first, then you’re going to make mistakes because you’re going to make short-term decisions that aren’t focused on creating a long-term, successful company.”

Sloan began dismantling the sales incentives that created the bad behavior and stopped paying employees on how many products they sell. Instead, they shifted the metrics to how often customers used their accounts and a range of customer experience metrics.

However, as with all changes, the devil is in the detail and employees had begun raising concerns again about customer-unfriendly practices emerging. A report by the Committee for Better Banks highlighted a continued culture of fear in which front line employees were not engaged in the change process but instead had it imposed on them.

“Honestly, it’s perceived as a joke — ‘Oh yeah, they’ve changed things,’ ” said Meggan Halvorson, 35, who works in Wells Fargo’s private mortgage banking division in Minneapolis. “I haven’t met anybody, personally, who believes what they’re saying or that it’s the case.”

Unfortunately, this has all been too little too late at least for Tim Sloan who was pressured into early retirement in early 2019.

In his final statement as CEO to the House Financial Services Committee he stated:

“We have more work to do, and that is an ongoing commitment by all of Wells Fargo’s 260,000 team members — starting with me — to put our customers’ needs first, to act with honesty, integrity, and accountability; and to strive to be the best bank in America.”

Within a month he would be gone.

What are the lessons?

Intensity and Velocity Matters

Changes need to be led with intensity and purpose from the top team throughout the organization. One of the reasons Tim Sloan was pressured into early retirement was that changes were not happening fast enough. There is a level of intensity and engagement required by the CEO to shift culture, and this is particularly important when the culture has gone bad.

Personally, “seeing the front.”

This term comes from the military and is based on the idea that leaders must see what is happening at the front lines themselves before making crucial decisions. The front line must be engaged in the process, the people doing the work matter and the daily interactions customers have with those people determine how the brand is perceived over time.

If change is imposed from the top, it is naturally resisted. The result is that employee initiative gets squashed, ownership is destroyed, and people keep their heads down out of fear of losing their job. In short, you get compliance, the bare minimum out of people.

If more direct attention had been paid to the front lines at Wells Fargo it would have been clearer what needed to happen to improve the customer and employee experience. If done correctly this will result in better business performance.

Metrics can help or hurt.

How people are measured can result in behavior that improves the customer experience or works against it. Clearly, the unrealistic sales targets at Wells Fargo resulted in the wrong behavior, that does not mean sales targets are bad; they are a necessary part of driving business performance. However, the way in which they are implemented matters.

Likewise, measures of customer experiences can be used in the right way or the wrong way. If they are used to performance manage, as a “stick,” they result in fear and resentment. Ironically, this works against the very thing they were designed to do which is to improve the customer’s experience. These metrics must be designed as learning tools that help employees develop and grow. This creates an environment that unleashes most people’s natural desire to deliver great experiences for their customers.

Transforming a company’s culture begins with a genuine desire by the top leadership to make things better. However, it then must be followed with concrete action by leaders at all levels.

If you want to catalyze customer-centric change across your organization, start by measuring how customer-centric you are today with the world’s only customer-centric culture benchmark, the Market Responsiveness Index.

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Posted in Case Study, Customer Centric Culture, Customer Centric Leadership, Market Culture Inaction

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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 Culture, Customer Obsessed Leadership, Customer Obsession, Customer-Centricity, customer-obsession, transparency, Trust

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

Posted on June 26, 2018 by | Leave a comment

iStock_000003915234Small

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

In this great article by Julie Bort, Jeff explains:

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

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

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

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

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

Posted on June 12, 2018 by | Leave a comment

apple_customer_centricity_tim_cook

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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