How to be customer-centric organization (Step by Step Guide)

The Importance of customer-centric organization is no more arguable as most of us knew their pros and cons. A week ago I came across with an article on Transformation Methodology by Uhl and Gollenia (2013). It inspires me to relate my experience and transformation methodological model with customer experience development context. In order to help those who is looking to implement CEM and those who has implemented, but failed to differentiate themselves.  

We know that delivering the customer satisfaction, may lead the company to get better ranking in the market, and happier customer and employee lead faster and sustainable growth but how to act? How should you align your organizational activity as a customer centric? Often it’s more difficult for the rigid enterprise. Most often we take action to facilitate customer but often those are insufficient & not planned and analyzed enough to bring the real fruit.

So, here I organized the entire activities in 5 steps

1) Vision, common purpose and value proposition

2) Define customer journey and determine what matter most the customer

3) Continuous improvement in customer journey and aware of change in customer demand

4) Engage entire organization to deliver high-quality service

5) Create performance management system and define metrics

Other than major activities, I also try to explain about resources and easy trap which help you to get ready and escape danger;

 Addition Resource Requirement

 Loophole 

Vision

It’s first and crucial point for organizational development; none of the project or organization can survive for a long time without having proper vision. To be customer-centric management has to decide where they want to see the organization in future and on selected variable what is the current position of the company. For example, as if any company chooses the variable such as Innovation, customer centric or operation then they should analyze current score and expected future score of these variable.

Common Purpose

It’s another crucial part which can give mean to the entire organization and motivate entire team to achieve excellence. There should not be any one man show to define it instead consent of different stakeholder must be taken into account. Its general it includes; what company does, to whom, and it’s not easy.

Value Proposition

There are different parameters to define the value proposition related to customer however in my opinion; broadly it can be defined as coefficient of following three categories

 Customer demand

 Resource of an enterprise

 Research output on competitor’s offering

Define Customer Journey

Secondly, define the customer journey. It includes starting point and end point of a customer within operational activities. Most often there are several customer journeys within an enterprise for example for a logistic company such as UPS or DHL it can be D2B (demand to business), P2P (pick up to payment) and S2S (seek(complaint or queries) to solve).

Determine what matter most to customer

Understanding what matter most to the customer, it’s a hard job. Most often multiple rigorous research required to evaluate the customer demand. However it’s subjected to market, customer base and industry. It’s suggested to perform both type of research (quantitative and qualitative) to have depth understanding of customers which helps to create a differentiative value proposition.

Continuous improvement in Customer experience

This is a point where management mindset plays a crucial role after the vision. Now you are in the market with your offering and its time to,

 Capture the voice of customer

 Keep an eye on changing nature of customer demand and perception

 Engage blue color job to top manager within CEM program

To engage entire organization can be easy if team sizes are small vice versa it can denting for the big organization to manage it. There is multiple approaches to enable the customer-centric process, however, there are two approaches are pretty popular these days in many organization from airline to logistic companies have opted this approach known as 1)NPA and 2)STTT

Engage entire organization

Without team engagement in the entire process, you could not achieve what you intend to achieve being customer centric. There are multiple actions can be taken to engage the entire team such as

 Sharing CEM report

 Modified-CS Training for team, depends on position and work profile

 Incentive policy base on CS metrics

 Market CEM (by article, poster, and flyers within the organization)

Create Performance management system and Define metrics

To perform customer-centric strategy, you need to have software to capture customer voice at different channels which can enable you to analyze and share information within the organization and proper metrics need to be defined which directly link with process performance, satisfaction, and revenue.

What Additional Resource Require for CEM 

 Management will and Strategy

 Transformation Team (Task force)

 Software (to capture, shares, and analyze the customer voice and score)

Loophole

There is always pros and cons in every action and decision we take hence some following important points worth analyzing;

1) Don’t overlook Employee instead similar program should be implemented to understand employees.

2) Avoid thinking of only touch point while thinking of what matter most to customer

3) Linking NPA score to incentive may have a wrong effect hence need creative solution depend on context.

4) Make sure that voice of the customer captured, shared and discussed rather than just having customer score.

Summary
If you want to progress in the competitive market than customer-centric strategy may help you to increase sales, revenue, and position. Although, organizational  alignment with the customer is a tough task. So if you stuck anywhere in your journey of Customer Experience Management please consider to bother me. :)