Customer-centric organizations use experience insights as the basis for each work group’s thinking and actions.
(Centric means aligned: customers’ well-being is the center of every decision).
Insights Usage Rate is a new phrase I’ve coined to represent how well your enterprise is absorbing, adopting, and acting on insights about customers (CX), partners (PX), and employees (EX).
To calculate your Insights Usage Rate, count the number of potential uses of CX, EX, and PX insights in a category for the denominator, and the number of high-quality uses in that category for the numerator.
For example, if you have 10 lines of business, and 5 of them are using CX insights earnestly, then the ratio of 5/10 is their Insights Usage Rate: 50%.
Why does this drive growth?
1) Anything you do that bothers customers costs you!
- Longer sales cycles due to distrust.
- Extra marketing required to overcome negative word of mouth.
- Higher costs to serve: customer service, returned materials, remedies, etc.
- More expense to retain customers: loyalty incentives, customer success, etc.
- Lower productivity as value-rescuing dominates precious time, resources, morale, and tenure.
- Anything you do that bothers employees or partners costs you!
- Myopic management, quiet quitting, and sloppy handoffs cause missed opportunities.
- Austerity, skimpflation, shrinkflation, and inflation make everything harder.
Lower costs, with larger profit margins, result from customer-centric organizations.
2) The more you align with customers, the more value you create!
- Insights spur creativity for differentiation.
- Agile design excels more often, with greater success internally and in the marketplace.
- Higher productivity as value-creating dominates perspectives, motivations, and rewards.
- The more you align with employees and partners, the more value you create!
- Shared values instill trust and respect for interdependencies.
- Shared vision motivates coordination and collaboration.
Higher growth, with sustained upward trends, result from customer-aligned organizations.
This article adds depth to the first of six sections in the article What’s Your Insights Usage Rate? 24 Ways to Boost 2024 CX ROI.
Customer-centric organizations respect the hand that feeds them. In your enterprise:
- Does everyone recognize customers as the source of their budgets and salaries? (Otherwise, you’re in a Ponzi scheme.)
- Do they realize they’re either serving customers or serving someone who does?
- Do they see the consequences of their mis-coordination in terms of squandered potential for their budgets and compensation?
- Do they ensure value is increasing for customers whenever changes in the business are needed?
If your answer is “no” to any of these questions, you’re under-using customer insights! Increase your customer insights usage rate to ensure all managers and employees recognize and respect that their existence is a direct result of customers selecting your brand, and hence, paying for your jobs.
Accordingly, every organization enterprise-wide should use CX+PX+EX insights to shape their mindsets, timeliness, interdependencies, and handoff performance standards.
4 Organizational CX Usage Rates
Your CX team should show each of these 4 categories of organizations how they can tweak their work approach to:
1) Continually improve value for underserved, overshot, and unserved customers. (Product Teams)
- Underserved customers have unfulfilled needs. Your product/service is underperforming or it needs more functionality.
- Overshot customers do not need all features of your product/service. A lite version would suit them better.
- Unserved customers do not have access to your product/service. You need to revise your business model, distribution, etc. to reach them.
2) Champion continuity of value across the end-to-end customer journey for customers and investors. (Account Teams)
- Ideal Customer Profiles (ICPs) should match purchasing power with operational cost to serve. Otherwise, you’re causing churn.
- Consistency of the entire experience should support each customer achieving their intended outcome from your brand.
- Investors benefit most when you maximize mutual value while minimizing waste.
3) Get crystal clarity for how you help rather than hurt the above-listed Product and Account team goals. (Support Functions)
- Reduce or remove policies and processes that stand in the way of maximizing value to customers and minimizing waste.
- Improve timeliness and effectiveness of policies and processes that motivate customer-centric teams for products and accounts.
4) Make CX insights your North Star for every business decision, with EX insights as next priority, and PX insights as well. (Senior Leadership Team)
- Link customer outcomes to financial outcomes in every sentence referencing money or objectives.
- Assess what’s out-of-sync with customers in your vision, mission, values, structure, and CapEx / OpEx policies.
- Re-align out-of-sync policies, processes, agendas, reviews, metrics, approvals, rewards, recognition, and succession.
Your CX Team Role
How can CX teams help these organizations absorb, adopt, and act on CX insights for the purposes listed above?
It’s all about how you collect, clarify, communicate, and champion insights.
- Collect almost-free VoC first, as the basis for more interesting questions in formal VoC.
- Clarify insights by looking for patterns — data informs managers, and patterns stimulate smarter value creation.
- Communicate insights in ways that clobber your audience over the head with key points and spur them to exclaim, “That can’t stand! What can we do about this opportunity?”. This reaction is essential for generating CX ROI. Business as usual is not ROI-generating!
- Champion insights through suggestions for various functional areas, workshops, and change management for accountability and applause of progress and action plan completion.
Customer-centric organizations do not materialize from mere training or programs.
Every well-respected customer-centric firm achieved this status from crystal clarity about who pays for salaries and budgets. They are obsessively consistent about how each organization’s thinking and decisions must align to customers’ well-being. They see customers’ prosperity as their path to prosperity — in their career happiness, company growth, and investors’ preferences.
Employee experience and partner experience insights are used by customer-centric organizations with urgency to resolve root causes of gaps. Top priority is placed on customer experience gaps, and how partners and employees must adjust their thinking and actions to stop these gaps permanently. Within this context, PX and EX gaps must be addressed by adjusting managers’ thinking and actions in ways that are sustainable as your company’s ongoing habits (way of life).
Start now to monitor these 4 organizations’ insights usage rates. Follow the advice in this article to quicken your transformation toward customer-centric organizations so that you’ll reap higher growth rates at lower costs: win-win for everyone.
This article gives you more clarity in how to deploy CX-Inspired Performance, which is 1 of 4 CX Leader gold metrics referred to in these articles:
24 CX ROI Metrics for Your Chief Customer Officer Prosperity Playbook and
4 Gold CX Metrics for CX Leader Metrics.
