Most people know how critical it is to understand the customer and be customer-centric, yet genuine customer focus is rare. Profit and business growth is not in the "knowing" but in the "doing" and focus on customers definitely needs processes and structure to become reality.
Below are a few key steps for organizations to become truly customer-centric:
Establish a Formal Process to Create a Dialogue With Your Customers
- Your managers or executives should spend time with customers on a weekly or monthly basis and create casual interactions/discussions. Many top CEOs in Fortune 500 firms report that they spend upwards of 40-50% of their time with customers.
- Spend time at your customer's home (if you sell to homeowners) or workplace (if you sell to businesses): simply observe your customers when they are buying, installing, or using your products. What are their reactions and how do they feel? You will only really find out if you're right there with them - watching as they experience your product. This is how Procter and Gamble found out that customers in Mexico valued "water preservation" to a great extent. Based on this customer insight, Procter and Gamble developed a new detergent product and gained market leadership.
- Organize formal interviews with your customers where you can grill them for 1-2 hours. Use the "why" technique to dig deep and get valuable consumers insights about why they use your category, how they perceive the world around your products, and what their buying habits are (where they shop, who they consult, how they price-shop, etc). Young children are naturally good at using the "why" technique. Here's how it works.
You say "it's getting late, and it's time to go to bed"
The 2-year old asks "why?"
"Tomorrow's a school day, and you need your sleep"
"why?"
"because you need to be rested to do well in school"
"why?"
"because you need to get good grade so that someday you can go to college"
"why?"
"because if you go to college, you can get a good job and take care of yourself"
"why?"
"because if you can take care of yourself, then you can take care of ME when I get old!"
While this conversation is taken to the extreme, it shows how the "why" technique can yield deep consumer insights and help you understand your customer's feelings and aspirations.
- Develop a structure for everyone to report and share their new customer insights with your other employees - for instance, make it mandatory to report findings on a quarterly basis.
- Involve customer service in pro-actively providing feedback from customers. Ask your reps questions about your customers: for instance, what they like or don't like about your brand, or problems they experience and how they seem to feel about it.
- Invite customers to speak about their business and about your products with your customer service, marketing, sales and R&D groups.
Develop your Products or Programs Hand-in-Hand with Your Customers
- Involve customers EARLY in the process of a new program development – and keep them involved along the way. In a business-to-business situation, the success of your new products often depends on how many of your customers you have talked to. Target a minimum of 10-15 customer feedback sessions.
- Make sure you pick the right target: who are the people making the purchasing decision and who are the influencers?
Align The Organization Around the Customer
- Inventory your ongoing projects. Are they are focused on the customer or are they only mostly focused on getting more sales and running business operations?
- Look at your R&D investments: are they high enough to generate product differentiation and improved customer experience?
Understand Customer Choices
- Create an e-commerce or CRM architecture to effectively analyze customer choices.
- Connect with your customers at every point in the sales process: meet with them and ask open questions to evaluate how they perceive their customer experience.
Take It a Step Further: Build Your Organization Around The Customer, For The Customer
- As the company grows, develop your organization in customer groups (or create ad-hoc cross-functional teams designed around customer groups).
- ACFC: At the Customer, For the Customer. General Electric took it a step further and developed ACFC programs where GE employees work at the customers' worksite.
As with everything, reward appropriate behavior - make "customer-focus" part of your performance reviews and let your managers know they will be evaluated on their customer-centric initiatives. Overcommunicate with your staff: publicize great, customer-focused heroes, and make sure you constantly talk about customers in your meetings. Don't be afraid to bore your staff with repetition, or you will never really get the message across.
