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Dick Lee
Advocacy: Customer Centric Business Process
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Consultant, speaker and author Dick Lee is founder and principal of St. Paul,
Minnesota-based High-Yield Method. HYM is a boutique consultancy with 15
years’ successful experience helping clients create customer-centric
organizations. Past clients include American Express, eBay, Honeywell and Microsoft – although SME clients are the mainstay of Dick’s practice.
Creating Customer-Centric Companies
08-Dec-2010
The recipe for creating customer-centric companies is patently simple: 1.) Open a customer-centric company; 2.) Keep it that way.
But what about the other 99.9% of companies started to make money, with customers coming in second?
While Amazon.com, Apple, Fed-X, Nordstrom, Southwest Airlines and others took this “easy” way - albeit Apple and Nordstrom both needing founder
“rescue” from outside management teams lacking customer-sensitivity -
the vast majority of organizations are trying to act more customer-focused without much lasting success.
Customer-centricity is not acting: Many in the CRM and CEM communities, or influenced by them, believe that corporate good will towards customers and a well-trained, friendly staff will turn them customer-focused. Hell, some still believe software’s the magic bullet. Wrong. Very wrong. Agreed, corporate commitment to change and customer-motivated staff are essential building blocks for achieving customer-centricity, but then what? If that’s all companies do, they wind up with excellent staff lacking appropriate process and technology support unable to perform how customers want them to perform. And before long, it all goes to hell in a hand basket, usually with “unfair” customers taking the blame.
Getting serious about customer-centricity: Most organizations trying to cozy up to customers instinctively try to avoid: a.) investing too much time; and b.) significant organizational impact. Avoiding both puts an insurmountable concrete barrier smack in the middle of the road companies must take to marry up with customers. Progress comes to a dead halt soon after the endeavor begins, leaving many organizations thoroughly disillusioned.
Going from inside-out (company-centric) to outside-in (customer-centric) is damned hard. It requires strenuous effort; and it requires willingness to accept organizational change. And it also requires knowing how to reach the end goal.
Take the right steps in the right sequence: Enough formerly inside-out companies - including a sizeable portion of the retail auto industry - are successfully becoming outside-in, validating it can be done. When it’s done right.
Here’s how:
- Step #1, Strategy: Start by aligning business strategy with customer needs, wants and preferences - including what customers may not yet realize they want. Here’s where employee training and motivation start.
- Step #2, Process: Next align business process with business strategy. Customer-driven process design stays focused on creating new value for customers, not cost-cutting. Yes, the outcomes reduce cost further than cost-cutting initiatives, but that’s beside the point. And use a process design approach that starts with customers and works back towards the company - not the other way round as Six Sigma and Lean work.
- Step #3, Technology: Then align technology with process to properly enable redesigned work.
- Step #4, Organizational design: Last, realign the organization to best deliver customer work outcomes. Most companies are very surprised at how organizationally misaligned with customers they are, mostly because they weren’t thinking about customers or process when they drew org charts.
The missing links: Many organizations working toward customer-centricity don’t get past first base. A few still go straight to #4, which is comical. Those that do take step #2 - redesigning what work they do, how and who does it - often complete the journey. Unwillingness to change and change management issues remain a major impediment. But progressively more companies are finally believing the risks of standing pat far exceed the risks of change. So life is slowly getting better in the customer-centricity lane.
To stay current with this topic please join the new Linkedin group, Building the Customer-Centric Organization. Membership includes outstanding professionals in CEM, CRM, Process, Organizational Development & Change Management.
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