Customers keeping you awake at night?
Customer centricity is just lip service unless Leadership walks the talk!
Companies become customer-centric when your route to personal growth is through serving the customer. I remember being the CMO in the late 1990s at Shoppers Stop & B. S. Nagesh, the CEO, exemplified being a customer-centric leader. Diwali (then & now) was a big event in retail & I remember how he asked all leaders in the central team to be out there in the stores manning some customer-facing role-cashier, customer care associate, etc just so that we get what it means to see Diwali shopping pressure in the arena! Again when I was the CMO at HDFC bank, I remember a point when complaints kept coming in about how customers would call an HDFC bank office & no one would pick up or would leave a customer unattended. Aditya Puri instituted this process where he would call any random office every morning & he expected to hear “This is HDFC bank. May I help you”. If he didn’t hear that, he would call you back & then you heard him! Suddenly, customer calls started being taken & life improved for the customer.
The above are more cosmetic examples of customer-centric action. How you embed the customer in your decision making is the real issue. There is this anecdotal story about Jeff Bezos leaving a seat vacant in the board room & saying that it belonged to the customer. The idea was to think about the customer’s view before every important decision. This is the mission Bezos has created at Amazon: “Our mission is to be Earth's most customer-centric company. This is what unites Amazonians across teams and geographies as we are all striving to delight our customers and make their lives easier, one innovative product, service, and idea at a time.” Type “relentless.com” into your browser and watch how it redirects you to Amazon’s webshop. Their message is clear: they are relentless retailers. Bezos originally thought of calling his company Relentless. com-that URL still takes you to Amazon's site-before he adopted the name of the world's largest river by volume.
Amazon aspires to be “Earth’s most customer-centric company.” Numerous mission statements are sprinkled with customer focus. But in reality, it is hard to be customer centric. I loved the concept that Prof Ranajoy Gulati speaks about: “In fact, the big leap that companies need to make is to “not sell what they produce” but to “solve customer problems” & then suddenly “who produces the product is no longer important “because you start “owning the problem space”.
Source: The above figures are from Accenture
You need to get every leader in the company to think about the customer. While many do this through training & external consultants, often they fail because they are not able to embed this type of thinking in their “plumbing”.
Steve Kerr, the chief learning officer of GE under Jack Welch, used to say that GE’s reputation for developing leaders was so good that he constantly had visitors wanting to tour their corporate university in Crotonville and discover the secret sauce. At the end of the tour, they would often say, “I don’t understand, it doesn’t look that different from what our company does.” Steve would say, “We don’t produce great leaders because we have the greatest programs, we produce them because we are the world’s greatest plumbers. At GE, we decide on the behaviors we want to see from leaders and then hook up all the plumbing: hiring, feedback, incentives, systems, culture, and promotions. All of it is connected together to drive the leadership behaviors that the business wants. Most companies do great training, but they forget to connect the plumbing and it all goes down the sink.”
So remember that the heart of a customer-centric transformation lies in plumbing. Part of the plumbing is the process of developing leaders who grow into customer-centric leaders.
The Centre for Creative Leadership has summarized this very well into three components:
Heat Experiences—Leaders who take on difficult, uncomfortable assignments that force them to grow. Selecting these heat experiences in customer-facing leadership roles would enhance the customer eccentricity quotient for the leader.
Colliding Perspectives—Leaders listening to, and learning from people who were different from them. Creating opportunities for leaders to learn from leaders outside their company & in fact even outside their industries can accentuate this even more. Imagine every key leader being mentored or coached by someone from Amazon or Zappos or even a Paytm & Flipkart. The perspectives are so different & the solutions so unfamiliar for legacy companies that this colliding perspective will create leadership growth.
Reflection—They integrated these experiences and new perspectives to advance their thinking.
Source: The above figures are from the Centre for Creative Leadership
While most people are happy to be good enough, superior performers continually push themselves into heat experiences (e.g., bigger, more complex roles). Companies that become customer-centric constantly ask leaders to become customer-centric by unleashing customer heat experiences
Customer Heat experiences are tasks or assignments that have the following conditions
It’s a first-time experience.
Results matter.
There is a chance of success and failure.
Important people are watching.
It is extremely uncomfortable. If you are currently experiencing three or more of the above at work, you are probably in a heat experience
A customer-centric leader exhibits customer-centric behaviors that motivate others to follow suit. Some key customer-centric behaviors as highlighted by Alain Thys from Futurelab are:
spend at least a day a month personally talking to customers to better understand their needs;
ask what is in this for our customers? at every decision, so that their team always considers the customer’s voice;
systematically include measurable customer objectives in performance reviews, starting with their own;
enable and encourage their staff to engage with customers by giving them time and resources;
call meetings to review customer feedback in their team at least once a month and invite other departments to these reviews;
set the example in going online at least once a month to seek out customer comments and make a positive (direct or indirect) contribution to their conversations;
seek to include customer lifetime value as a metric in all financial and investment decisions;
make a formalized, quarterly effort to seek new ways of focusing on their customers.
The CEO needs to get the team to answer the real questions:
Is your leadership team initiating projects and tasks that take your customer as the starting point? What jobs is the customer hiring you for & are you reducing their pain?
Are your leaders empowering team members to solve customers’ problems? What is the hierarchy of these problems and are the customers telling you that, or only your sales & channel teams?
Do your processes eliminate roadblocks standing in the way of sharing customer data and insights across teams?
Are your projects and product roadmap shaped by new customer insights?
After asking these questions, the CEO must ensure that the plumbing for customer centricity is developed:
What does it mean if we focus on the customer?
What does it require us to do as Executives?
What is the role-modeling behavior that goes with that? Do I see the CEO & other leaders displaying such role modeling behavior?
What do we need to recognize and reward people for?
What processes and procedures do we have to change? Is there data that tells me this unequivocally?
Who do we have to promote to key roles to show that we are serious about this initiative? Who can be given Heat assignments?
What products and services would we have to offer and which would we have to cancel, regardless of profitability?
What organization structure & incentives can we create so that customers are treated as central to our mission.
These are tough discussions and require the team to step away from personal agendas and set an agenda based on the Customer.
So is your team asking these questions or are you just doing lip service to Customer-centricity?
Get started in 2021 before Amazon disrupts you!