Wednesday, June 30, 2010

Building a customer-centred business

Some solutions on how to put the customer at the centre of your organization.

I was pleased to participate as one of nine panelists in a kitchen-table dialogue on June 23, 2010 – led by moderator Alan Kay of The Glasgow Group and hosted by Rick Wolfe of PostStone Corporation – about how companies can get past thinking about brands and become truly customer-centred.



Examples of organizations that are considered customer-centred
  • Tim Horton’s – a brand that’s become an icon by tapping into the Canadian experience.
  • Life Choice Foods – a virtual company that offers top-quality kid-friendly organic foods.
  • Amazon – an online retailer that understands past purchase patterns and presents relevant recommendations.
  • Zappos – an online retailer with an explicit set of family core values.
  • Zip (Netflix in the U.S.) – an easy-to-use, hassle-free home DVD rental service.
  • Best Buy – uses information from employees to better understand customer preferences.
  • L.L. Bean – a retailer offering guaranteed customer satisfaction across all touchpoints.

Some barriers to putting customers at the centre
  • Leadership bias – CEOs/CFOs do not generally gain exposure to a customer mindset in their education or their career path. 
  • Insufficient analytics – despite plenty of data, few businesses seem to have succeeded in integrating all their information to compile a realistic 360-degree view of their customers’ value to the business.  
  • Organizational structure – with the Marketing department owning the brand in many ‘siloed’ organizations, it’s hard to get the entire business focused on the customer. The job of a traditional leader is to provide predictable results to shareholders, and organizations have been narrowly structured to ensure profitability.

Some solutions for being customer-centric

* Begin with the business’s existing information resources, use business intelligence to identify and understand the most valuable customers, then ask them how you can best meet their needs. (We’ve never had more capability to identify and understand customers.)

* Don’t start with your widget and then look for customers; instead, start further upstream by ask a group of prospects what they need, then design the widget accordingly.

* Start by being employee-centric:
  • Hire the right staff. (North America tends to value ‘talkers’ instead of ‘listening,’ which needs to be built into the company’s value system.) 
  • Inform them about the company’s progress.
  • Value them by asking for their input.
  • Report back to them on what you’re doing with their input (or explain why you’re not doing something.) 
  • Reward them for their successes. 
* Leverage a ‘use-case process’ (a user-centric perspective, drawn from the software business) in thinking about the business:
  • Who are our various users?
  • Why are they coming? 
  • Where are they coming from? 
  • What are they trying to do? 
  • How long do they stay (determined using today’s metrics)?
* Remember the singular, customer-focused vision of some of the great entrepreneurs (e.g., Jeff Bezos of Amazon; Steve Jobs of Apple; Ray Kroc of McDonald’s). But things get tough when the leader passes the torch. After a few years in the value of death after the death of Sam Walton, Lee Scott of Wal-Mart transformed the company’s focus on eliminating waste to cut prices into a focus on environmental sustainability.

* A customer-centric vision must be strongly held and acted upon by the senior leadership team, but then ‘given up’ by the leadership team and handed over to people in the organization for their input. Ask them four questions:
  1. Where did our company come from? (where were we yesterday?)
  2. What are we today? (how do we appear to you now?)
  3. Where should we be in five years? (what would you like us to be?)
  4. Do you have any ideas of how we’ll get there?
Senior leaders should be sponsors who clear barriers, but not run the team. With this autonomy, the teams will spend money responsibly to help address the improvement opportunities.

* Thanks to social media today, we can listen to millions of people for their ideas. Make the customer the expert in the changes they want made. However, be conscious of how you’ll use the input you gain!

* Be conscious of what you’re selling: the tangible product (which doesn’t change), versus the brand (which is fluid).

On brands and branding
  • “A brand is not what you think you are, but what they (the customer) think you are.”
  • “The brand is the value we give our customers; it’s what we stand for with them. If we can consistently present this message throughout the organization at all levels, then everyone will gets it; this is what we’re about.”
Some quotable quotes
  • “Being customer-centric is a lot of work, and you can’t lie. You have to make real connections; you can’t hide behind your desk. It takes courage.”
  • “Don’t confuse the ‘scoreboard’ with the ‘game.’ Profit is the scoreboard, and it’s more important to some than to others. But the game – for instance, providing nutrition to the mass market in Canada – is what’s important. If we play the game well, the score will take care of itself. The customer-focused game is what we should be take pride in.”
  • “Don’t suck up [to your boss], suck down [by telling your boss what your people have done].
 Some further reading

1 comment:

Tim Morawetz said...

Update: Check out this article to remind yourself about the 'religion' of being customer-centred:
http://www.mediapost.com/publications/?fa=Articles.showArticle&art_aid=137164&nid=119490#