Customer focus doesn’t evolve on its own. It’s carefully cultivated over time through a variety of processes. At the forefront of this effort is leadership. The organization’s leadership has the primary responsibility of making every decision and every action based on customer focus. Customer focus can’t be relegated to lower levels in the organization. It must start at the top and be regularly refreshed from the top. When organizations fail to achieve customer focus, it’s usually because leadership was never properly engaged in the process. In other words, top management failed to lead. Leadership must embrace a number of realities related to customer focus. These are fundamentals that should be a priority in each top manager’s to-do list. Following is an examination of each fundamental and an analysis of how top management can deliver on one of its most important duties: driving customer focus.

Customer focus is the leadership’s responsibility
A couple of years ago, I was speaking to a company president about a problem his firm was having with a critical customer complaint. Root cause analysis pointed to confusion about customer specifications in the Finishing Department. The liability to the company was almost a million dollars. As expected, the president was very upset about the whole affair.

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