Criteria for promotions, raises, hiring, bonuses, budget expansion and recognition reveal your true customer experience motives. These criteria drive behavior even more than goals and values. These “business rituals” criteria are the truth about your culture. They’re the engine behind your growth.
While an upward trajectory in sales, profit or market share can be induced (increased via forced or non-organic means) through marketing and price enticements or business expansion and acquisitions, organic growth is spurred by customers’ passion for your brand. Organic growth — without costly marketing/price enticements — is ideal.
Organic growth is the aim of customer experience management: customer retention, share of customer wallet, customer engagement, customer referrals for market share growth — customer lifetime value.
What gets people ahead — or not — is the reality of your culture. These motives drive performance. If motives favor financial factors over customer passion factors, you’ll be leaving money on the table. Financial factors require ongoing enticements and expansions for growth at a steep cost. Financial factors put the cart before the horse: customers are the source of financials, so customers represent the horse and financials represent the cart. Remember that investors leave when customers leave, not the other way around. If you’re following the money you’re following customers, correctly.
Customer passion for your brand requires customer-centered business management. The more your business feels like a natural fit for your customers, the more passionate they’ll be. A win-win attitude is required in everything your business does in order to be customer-centered. Win-win criteria for business rituals demonstrate your conviction that doing what’s best for customers will in due course serve all other needs.
Here are 4 prerequisites to growth-driving customer experience motives:
1st Prerequisite: Center Your C-Team on Customers
Corporate objectives must make it clear that customers’ well-being is your path toward growth. Ensure your strategic planning process starts with what’s important to customers. Regularly assess what’s at-odds or in-harmony with your customer experience objectives: structure, agendas, communications, and decision-making.
One example of this was shared by the CEO of HCL Technologies who drove complete realignment of his company to cater to what customers need. Another example is from Kootenay Savings Credit Union, which realigned with customers from the top down to spur growth.
2nd Prerequisite: Center Your Rituals on Customers
Rituals are the regularly cadenced things you do to run your business: staff meetings, ops reviews, performance reviews, onboarding, succession, budgeting, recognition, and so forth. Inject customer-focus into all of these rituals. Initially, put a customer-focus placeholder in them and allow each work group to customize the customer-focus element, with a few examples of what’s expected. Take an inventory of what every group selected and build standardization into these rituals a little more year by year.
At Amazon, every meeting starts with a customer story to set the tone. At Applied Materials, team recognition categories and criteria fostered collaboration, customer-oriented handoffs for all employees, prevention of problem recurrence, and new value creation across the customer life cycle.
3rd Prerequisite: Center Your Metrics on Customers
Organize your data with customers’ care-abouts at the center, and your other care-abouts fanning out as spokes in a wheel. Regularly assess your dashboards, scorecards, and performance targets of all kinds to first highlight what’s in it for customers, and secondarily to link what’s in it for financials, operations, employees and other stakeholders.
One example of missing the mark for customer-centered metrics was shared recently by Bruce Temkin, co-founder of the Customer Experience Professionals Association. A hotel placed a laminated letter on a bedside table with instructions to provide a “10” rating when they received a survey. In the quest to manage customer experience, this actually ruins the experience for many customers. It negates the validity of the survey. As such the investment of money and time in the survey by the company and customers is a complete waste, and even spurs ill will. It’s a blatant company-centered motive, no matter how much customer sweet talk surrounds it.
4th Prerequisite: Center Your Attitudes on Customers
Employees and customers take their cues from informal actions much more than executives realize. Consistency and transparency are essential, particularly among leaders, and certainly among customer-facing personnel. At SunTrust, a couple of leaders started asking during conversations in meetings: are we saying this because customers told us so, or because we’ve been bankers so long? This question became a habit across the company. At Sungard, once a month a customer shares in a webinar what it’s like to be their customer. This has been eye-opening for engineers and others who rarely get the opportunity to see their customers’ realities.
How well do your business rituals criteria foster organic growth? When your success criteria rewards prevention of hassles and creation of mutual value, both formally and informally, that’s customer-centered.
Imagine how your culture could be more customer-centric if everyone had to demonstrate how they’re improving customer experience in order to be promoted, get a raise, get hired, receive a bonus, expand their budget, or receive recognition. (“Everyone” means every job level and functional area. “Customer” means external customers overall, as well as whoever is the recipient of each person’s output for use in subsequent processes, with customer touch-points as the end-game processes.)
Would your customers be better off? Would it be more enjoyable to work at your firm? Would that increase productivity? Would it reduce turnover of employees, customers, and shareholders? How much is turnover costing now? What’s a rough estimate of potential gains?
Think about how customer-centered business rituals criteria would change the following:
- Hunger for new insights from voice-of-the-customer
- Smooth handoffs between internal suppliers and internal customers
- Cross-organizational collaboration to improve value to customers
- Omni-channel consistency and synergy
- Balance of long-term and short-term focus
- Efforts to innovate mutual value for customers and the firm
- Silo-bridging across organizations, data, systems and processes
Customer-centered business is a way of life that keeps on giving. Customer passion is the engine for organic growth with many desirable byproducts: customer evangelists going above and beyond to promote your brands of their own accord, lower costs, more resources available for innovation, industry leadership, sustainable results.
Image licensed for use by ClearAction from Shutterstock.
