Amazon, a notoriously customer obsessed company, observes the strategic principle:
“Leaders start with the customer and work backwards. They work vigorously to earn and keep customer trust.”
Many organizations today say they put the customer at the center of everything they do; that they are customer obsessed. Yet, organizational behavior shows otherwise. The growth of customer success management teams have been an important step on a customer centric journey, but they usually tend to focus on customer experience post implementation, with an eye to renewals. That is, they are really part of the commercial organization to minimize churn, not the cornerstone of a customer obsessed culture.
Most companies, then, exist as customer reactive organizations. They don't seek to provide a proactively reliable experience throughout the entire lifetime of the customer journey; rather, they react to the information given to them by the customer - usually as some form of ad-hoc request, support case or escalation. That shift from reactive to proactive - the anticipation of what's important to the customer and resolving it before it becomes an issue - is the hallmark of a customer obsessed culture.
Customer obsession starts with the customer, and that culture has to be displayed at all levels of the organization. The table below compares customer obsessed cultural behaviors compared to customer reactive.
Customer Obsessed | | Customer Reactive |
Outside-in, customer outcome focused, starts with "why” | Focus | Inside-out, process & activity focused, starts with “how” |
Success is measured using metrics that are important and have value to the customer | KPIs | Success is measured within a team silo, not across the customer journey |
Decisions are made to support key priorities within the whole customer journey | Decision Making | Surveys are used to determine next action, not knowledge of the customer journey |
Teams are aligned around the customer journey and hold themselves accountable to improve the customer experience | Accountability | Lack of rigor in holding people accountable to customer experience (squeaky wheel issues are lobbed to team and followed with “did you get it done?” versus “how did this improve our customers lives?”) |
Annual planning and IT investment target specific customer experience improvement goals | Investment | Annual planning and IT investment are accomplished silo by silo versus being oriented around the customer journey |
Customer driven; the impact of decisions starts with the question “What does this mean to our customer?” | Organization | “Power core” driven; a particular organizational function dominates decision making (finance or sales, for example). (Do you know your power core?) |
Value Stream mapping exercises are cross-functional and bring teams together to improve processes. The first question we ask in the exercise is "What would the customer say is the value we provide to their business, and how would they measure it?". Investigating and aligning everyone around that answer is the first step toward becoming customer obsessed.
So: is your company customer obsessed? Or customer reactive?
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