Tag Archives: Customer Obsessed Leadership

Is it possible to compete with Amazon and win?

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/

 

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!

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