Who does your company exist to please? In your daily business operations, who ultimately determines whether you and your people get paychecks or pink slips? Who do the mission and vision statements place at the center of your employees’ universe? If your answer to all three questions is the customer, you’re not alone. Most leaders wake up each morning hoping to live up to their company’s promise to maximize customer value and deliver the best possible customer experience. Unfortunately, good intentions don’t always translate to success, and “customer-centric” is an ideal that most companies fail to uphold.
Creating a customer-centric company is a classic case of easier said than done. It’s a concept that every business leader at any level wants a grasp of and usually doesn’t have.
Tough economic times are coming, and if you aren’t giving your customers the most for their money right now, they won’t think twice about dropping you when times get tough, and that will be when you need them most.
No wonder “customer-centric” is thrown about so freely at most executive planning sessions. It’s even replaced “innovative” as the new, mandatory strategic language. It describes a way of doing business that is no longer optional, and most leaders are finding that living up to the phrase requires more than changing a few words around in the company’s vision statement.
Becoming a customer-centric organization requires a departure from years of tradition, a clear look at who and what your organization is, and a deeper understanding of what motivates your customers to buy from you or from your competitor. The cost to make this change is surprisingly low, and the benefits and returns are shockingly high. That’s why every company should make an effort to make the switch.
Following are a few truths you need to understand up-front:
Truth No. 1: Right now your company is product-centric.Most companies still base their operations on the value chain that was popularized by Michael Porter in the mid-1980s. The value chain is a string of critical processes that begins with raw materials, or inputs, and ends with a product or service delivered to a happy customer. Thinking this way makes sense because it’s easy to place the customer at the end of the process. This mindset doesn’t just affect an organization’s structure; it weaves its way into every aspect of how the organization manages itself, and how managers make decisions.
In short, it creates a situation in which employees throughout the organization are focused on delivering the product or service for which they are responsible. Engineers are working to design new products that will keep them one step ahead of their competition. Manufacturing is producing goods to meet customer orders or demand projections. The sales department courts potential buyers so that they become actual customers. Once they do, salespeople then return to identifying and selling new targets and try to transition those. Manufacturing works to refill shelves. Engineering continues developing products. The cycle continues.
Employees are trained to think in terms of product development, delivery, and value. Even if it doesn’t know it or intend to do so, the organization becomes product-centric, not customer-centric. Management is comfortable with this view of the world; after all, how can a mainstream management theory like the value chain approach be wrong? When they do try to focus on the customer, though, they don’t know how.
Truth No. 2: Your employees may not understand the customer.To put the value-chain concept in perspective, consider how a power utility works. Power is generated by a complex, and often dangerous, power plant. It’s delivered to the customer via a complicated, and often dangerous, network. The customer then consumes this power and must pay for it, creating the need for back office operations such as accounting, finance, and customer service. The rest of the company’s employees are highly educated engineers, highly trained and specialized workers, and a management team that’s also highly educated and experienced in their field. Together, they make up 75 percent of the organization.
But have you ever stopped to consider that an organization designed this way—and believe me, the power industry has plenty of such companies—has a lot of people focused on consistency in design, execution, and production, but little focus on the customers and what they want? That’s 75 percent of an organization that has little understanding of the customer’s true needs. It just goes to show what a challenge becoming customer-centric can be for most companies. But it’s possible; you simply need to know where to start.
Truth No. 3: Your company’s money isn’t allocated with the customer in mind.When trying to transition to a more customer-centric organization, employees who have power within the organization are reluctant to yield it to those who understand the customer better. Their unwillingness to relinquish power results in a reluctance to shift funding from traditional areas to those that most affect the customer.
To get an idea of what this kind of transition looks like for a company, let’s go back to the power utility example. For a power utility, this means that engineers, who have often dedicated their entire lives to the study of their field, must be considered equal to project managers and customer service agents, most of whom don’t hold an academic degree. Money, resources, and staffing must also focus on project management and call center technology, not just on million- or billion-dollar assets. There must be financial recognition that these things equally affect the customer—and when large sums of money are involved, change tends to happen slowly.
Truth No. 4: To stay viable in today’s business world, you must cut the value chain and hop on the “customer-critical path.”As you might have guessed, your customers are your partners on this path. They must start their journey before they even become your customers, while they’re still prospects, in other words. It isn’t always easy for a company to think along these new lines, but consider what new clients need when they approach your organization for the first time. Ask yourself questions such as: ‘”What do they really need?,” “Why did they choose to approach us and not our competitor?,” “Are they approaching just us or everyone in the market?,” and “What will set us apart?”
Once the customer perspective becomes clear, natural customer groupings will emerge. It’s your job to strive to see from the perspective of these natural customer market segments. From this initial entry point, the organization can methodically walk along the customer-critical path through each major step that these new customer segments must go through to become happy, paying customers. This is the true value chain of the organization—a string of processes that become critical because they directly affect the customer, regardless of the product, service, organizational chart, academic degree, or bias. Find the customer-critical path and you can guide your customer through your organization in the way that is most meaningful, and profitable, to them and you.
Truth No. 5: The customer-critical path offers more options for your customers.Any business leader knows that not every customer’s needs are the same. This remains true even within an industry that has only one real product, such as a power utility company, for example. The customer-critical path may start in several places in its efforts to meet the needs of several different types of customers—from household customers that simply need power turned on to major projects that require significant project management and preplanning.
Eventually, these starting paths merge at the point at which all customers are happy. From there, they may diverge. That’s the great advantage about being customer-centric. There isn’t one narrowly focused value chain confining your customers. The customer-critical path allows you to adapt easily to your customers’ needs so that your company can be useful to them long-term.
Truth No. 6: Adopting the customer-critical path can transform every aspect of your company.The customer-critical path approach offers a significant value for organizations that adopt it. It allows them to understand their customers well enough to segment and target them by products or services with more effective value propositions. This drives the bottom line in several ways. A stronger value proposition increases appeal, driving revenue. Better service and customer interaction improve the customer experience, increase customer loyalty, and drive customer lifetime value.
The customer-critical path also becomes a vital decision-making tool for management. It provides a clear and unbiased perspective on where resources should, and should not, be spent. It defines the relative worth of projects, assets, and expenditures, painting a clear picture of what results will be if the customer-critical path is not properly maintained.
If your mission and vision statements say that you’re customer-centric, follow the words up with real action. You’ll make your strategic plan actionable, setting your organization on a path toward true differentiation and market leadership. Properly crafted, the customer-critical path becomes a pleasant stroll through the park for your customers, and also happens to be the most profitable path for your organization.
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