improving & innovating the customer experience

Being customer focussed is not the same as customer centric

Insight Exchange provides practical guide to improving profits through becoming customer centric

January 2011 - An insight paper - "Becoming Customer Centric" - published by business consultancy Insight Exchange examines how many businesses are customer focused but very few are customer centric, where a product or service is designed, promoted and sold to fit into customers lives rather than asking customers to fit to the product or service.

It asks businesses three questions to determine if they are customer centric or not:

1. Do customers stand in the middle of their world or at the end of your supply chain?

2. Do you see you role as persuading customers to buy your brand, or one of matching their needs, wants and expectations?

3. Do you know what value you give to customers or what value they bring to you?

The paper explains how understanding the concept of customer value - the value businesses give the customer and the value businesses get from customers - is at the core of becoming customer centric. 

The paper, written by Simon Lidington, managing partner, Insight Exchange, also examines the difference between customer loyalty and customer retention, and how by 'looking from the other end of the telescope' companies can change their behaviour so they are loyal to customers. This approach creates long term customers and advocates - a real asset for business in competitive markets.

The paper concludes that the key to being loyal to customers is not via communications campaigns, market research or even improved processes but by investment in social capital - the stock of energy between employees to do things better. Many frontline teams have amazing energy, talents and experience that too often are not utilised to their maximum resulting in missed opportunities to create customer loyalty.

'Becoming Customer Centric' includes 10 actions that companies need to take if they want to become customer-centric:

1. Get your culture right - customers are more powerful than suppliers. Becoming customer-centric requires businesses to understand customer value. You can only do this by developing a mind-set and a culture that places customers at the heart of your business, and recognises that as you maximise your value to them, they will maximise their value to you. 

2. Don't rely on market research - your brand's ability to become sustainable depends on your people's ability to make decisions that enhance its position in customers' lives. They will not be able to do that simply through listening, second or third hand, to disaggregated pieces of research designed to ape scientific testing procedures. You need to understand how to create and use insight.

3. Think qualitative - this is not to say that quantitative is of no use, but that the quest to reduce the complexities of life to a simple set of numbers can lead to superficial and reductive thinking. Use open methods to lead, discuss, investigate and learn.

4. You can't manage customers - they are individuals, they don't like being managed by brands. They want to manage themselves.

5. Consider the real context your brand is purchased in - plus its consumption, usage and ownership. Do not rely on inside-out models. Develop an outside-in way of looking at things. How people really live, buy, consume, use and own will teach you more about becoming sustainable than any amount of MBA models.

6. Understanding the customer is like understanding life -  develop your thinking about the brand with customers; regard it as a process of continuous learning, change, development; believe that this process will change the way you think: fundamentally and disconcertingly. Remember, you are not in control - customers are.

7. Connect - dividing up the functions that enable you to manage a brand must not lead to divided thinking.  Joined up thinking is key. Encourage your people to think together not to just work alongside each other.  And use the customer as the focal point: if the customer is at the centre, then the customer is the thread that should link your people's thoughts, ideas and actions.

8. Believe in your people - frontline people are more important than processes. 'Great' processes are very often put there to make up for the perceived inadequacies of frontline people. But they don't and they can't. Brilliantly collaborative people, on the other hand, can make up for any amount of crass and badly joined-up process.

9. Your people are not islands - build social capital throughout your organisation. Bonds and bridges formed between people, departments, suppliers and partners are crucial to strengthening the foundation for delivering a brilliant customer experience.  

10. Build a culture of continuous improvement - create a widespread belief in everyone's ability to contribute to making things better; build lasting mechanisms that allow frontline people to address cultural and operational issues together; use the power of a growing community in your organisation to focus hard on the improving the customer experience; trust your people to innovate together.

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