Customers don’t care about your Business Silos
Customers don’t care about your Business Silos
You need a Customer experience Coach?
When I joined HDFC bank as the CMO in early 2000, one of my first meetings was with the CIO with the agenda “Datawarehouse Road map”. After 5 years on my last day, again the CIO invited me for a meeting with the same title. Data warehouses, Data lakes, Operational data stores..the list of jargons goes on. And yet as customers, we don’t get recognized by the company’s operational or CRM systems. And consolidating data is a basic building block for recognizing me!
A study by Kantar, a global data, insights, and consulting firm, shows that while 91 percent of retail banks chief executives in India see the need to be customer-centric, only 29 percent of customers believe banks truly offer customer-centric experiences.“Most CEOs believe customer centricity is essential for driving business growth. However, there is still a big gap between ambition and reality,” the study says.
All because different departments don’t talk to each other or data shared is not bubbled up to the system at the front end. Yet every consultant or technology company worth their salt talks about a 360-degree view of the customer.
So where is the gap! Are companies not investing enough in technology? While customer behavior is constantly changing, one constant has been the customer’s desire to be recognized across all channels. And yet a 2020 report from Gartner says: “Customers readily switch channels to obtain information or resolve issues; however, service channels are not connected, requiring customers to start over when switching channels, increasing customer effort, and frustration. Service organizations operate in a reactive manner at a transaction level, requiring customers to exert significant effort to navigate multiple service channels, often unsuccessfully, resulting in high call volume and customer dissatisfaction”.
Data is the core building block to improve customer experience & yet bringing it together & enabling it such that the customer benefits seems to be a tall order. There has been enough push by technology & consulting companies to try & sell more data warehouses or other “shiny new objects” to CIO’s to really make this happen.
In fact post-Covid, the digital tech will get larger investments. The research firm Gartner believes that IT spending in India will grow at six percent to touch the US$81.9 billion mark in 2021 on account of growth in segments, such as IT services, enterprise software tools, among others. And there's a lot of excitement about new technology in customer service, support, and success. The progress of video, real-time messaging, chatbots, and artificial intelligence (AI) is tangible & companies are beginning to adopt it. We know that Bots and AI will be a game-changer for customer support, especially where there is repetitive work. Blockchain technology has fascinating applications to contracting and how transparent payments are in the future. Smart contracts — a way for machines to enforce and execute contract terms and payments without human involvement — are a generation ahead of simple recurring payment models.
Look at this Gartner schematic, the intelligence is all there & yet on the ground as customers we don’t seem to be feeling it:
The problem actually lies elsewhere. It lies in how leaders can learn how to break the chains of silos in the service of customers. How can your CXO’s rise above internal complexity to see and manage the whole picture from the customer’s point of view.
The Leader’s Guide to Corporate Culture from the Harvard Business Review wrote:
Unfortunately, in our experience it is far more common for leaders seeking to build high-performing organizations to be confounded by culture. Indeed, many either let it go unmanaged or relegate it to the HR function, where it becomes a secondary concern for the business. They may lay out detailed, thoughtful plans for strategy and execution, but because they don’t understand culture’s power and dynamics, their plans go off the rails.
You Need a Customer Experience Coach?
Companies that are trying to move up this curve will need to relook at how their leaders are “leading in the age of the customer”? They need to create a Coaching Culture with leaders across the organization. Providing clarity about the customer centric part of their role and the impact that their behavior has on their teams and the customer’s experience (CX). They need a Customer experience coach who guides key leaders & helps them find their own solutions to help make the company more customer centric. Companies have spent enormous amount of money in changing technology & looking at the data-that is important but change will not happen without changing leadership behaviour on the ground.
Only then can you make this transition?
I spoke about how to create a winning Customer experience at an IIM Lucknow course on data analytics last week.
