Customer Centricity. It’s a thing right? I’ve been asked to talk about it several times across different sectors, across the world. My first thought is always the same…
What?
Isn’t it obvious that you must be customer-centric? What else is there? What’s the point if you aren’t being customer-centric?
I come from the theatre - where it’s all about the audience.
My particular world is improvised theatre, where you have to be even more customer-centric because you’re using audience suggestions to create the show. Not only are we entertaining an audience, it’s their input that helps us make up scenes on the spot: to help in co-creating the product, not unlike lots of organisations, where customers are part of the process. There is an improv show on television called ‘Whose Line Is It Anyway’. I run a two-day workshop for pharmaceutical sales representatives called, ‘Whose Script Is It Anyway?’
‘Script’ has two meanings; it could be the words you say or the prescription for the patient. That’s apparently how it’s referred to. So who does the prescription belong to? The sales rep, the healthcare professional, or the patient? The basic skill in improv is to listen - listen and use what you hear. Too many salespeople have their sales collateral, their script, but they don’t listen, I find.
Do you know the phrase ‘Winging it’? Some people think this is Improv. No. The derivation of ‘winging it’ is from scripted theatre. The actor has not learned their lines properly so keeps having to go to the wings at the side of the stage for a prompt. Improv is a form of theatre where there is explicitly no script.
Perhaps it used to be that companies wrote the script. And the audience - the customer - sat back and listened. Now the customer can be part of telling the story. Just as we performers bring our expertise and years of experience to the stage then use the audience’s input and energy, so firms bring deep knowledge and research but should listen to their customers who often say things that might not fit with your script. Improv is a mindset, where you accept the external data and respond, rather than run back to an old playbook.
Customer-centricity seems a great rallying cry but it’s not entirely clear what means in practice. Gartner define it as “the ability of people in an organisation to understand customers' situations, perceptions, and expectations. Customer-centricity demands that the customer is the focal point of all decisions related to delivering products, services and experiences to create customer satisfaction, loyalty and advocacy.”
Easy-peasy, right?
How do you feel when you’ve been a customer?
Have you rung up a firm and been told…
“Your call is important to us. You are Number 7459 in the queue”
Or
“Press 1 for new enquiries
Press 2 for accounts
Press 3 for existing enquiries
Press 4 for Press Enquiries
Press 5 if you like cheese”
And so on and so on…but NONE of the choices matches your problem!
Have you ever had an experience like this?
I saw a tweet once…’Are you talking your customer’s language? Or are you talking your own language?’
So maybe we should ask - what is NOT customer-centricity?
What are you and your organisation doing that isn’t customer-centric? Quite a lot, I reckon. Is Customer-Centricity just another buzzword - like Agile? Ask people in companies what Agile means and they say
“You mean hot-desking?”
“Oh yeah, saving money.”
- “It’s an IT thing. Which hasn’t worked.”
Actually the original Agile Manifesto was simple. It was that
individuals and interactions should matter more than processes and tools.
When you ask your people what is meant by Customer-Centricity, how would they describe it? It’s easy to proclaim ‘Customer-Centricity’ but how will you and your teams make it a reality? Is it something you can put on a slide, with lots of arrows and words? ‘Org charts’ don’t have the customer anywhere at all, do they?
Being customer-centric means staying close to your customer, doesn’t it?What does that mean? How can you be customer-centric when you know more about your brands than they do? Your job is to tell them what they don’t know, surely?
The most impactful products have launched only after thorough research and huge investment in creative exercises, right? Global teams start aligning themselves. They run some market research. Once they have aligned, then they align with their counterparts in other functions. Questions may arise. They run a validation exercise. They contact local teams for further alignment on the concept. Those teams feel empowered because they are fully Aligned. Success is guaranteed!
Or is it?
Did they ever actually involve the customer? The end user? Or were they just ensuring internal alignment all the time?
So give customers a voice, maybe? But what if they say the wrong thing?
- They don’t understand the science, do they?
- They’re not on top of the market research.
- They don’t understand your org chart
Have you ever asked your customers what they mean by customer-centricity? What would they prioritise? Hang on a minute - haven’t you done lots of market research? I bet you have lots and lots of data. But do you know what to do with it? Have you talked to existing customers? Or do you see them only through the prism of data analysis?
I have worked with different parts of the UK National Health Service. A while back, I ran a story-telling session. They told me that patients, when surveyed about their experience, could grade things on a scale of 1 to 5. Generally they would tick 3 or 4. But when asked to tell their story, it was very different. Some things had gone badly wrong.
Ask yourself, does your data match the everyday reality of the customer? Data is so much more sophisticated now, of course. I have worked with several companies who can analyse verbatim feedback rather than relying on simplistic, ‘rate us on a scale’ surveys. But I still receive these myself. I know that the data will be different if your scale is zero to five or to seven or to ten. Jeff Bezos, former CEO of Amazon said
“A remarkable customer experience starts with the heart, intuition, curiosity, play, guts, taste. You won’t find any of it in a survey.”
Who cares what he thinks - he’s off to the moon!
It’s easier to find what to count, rather than to count what matters. But will it count towards real customer-centricity? Is this an argument against data? No. It’s an argument for the human touch, looking to anticipate customer needs and behaviour and for small experiments. Beware the trap that spending more money means better, too. Big projects get big attention. If you’re not careful what matters is how big the budget is, not the effectiveness of the experiment. The more money you spend, the less we want to doubt the conclusions. This is called ‘The Sunk Costs Fallacy’. Most of us can think an example of something that got so big that nobody could stop it.
Do your brightest minds spend all day strategising and coming up with wow-y white papers and super spreadsheets? Scott Cook, of Intuit, said, “For every one of my failures, I had a spreadsheet that looked awesome”.
A friend’s daughter just started work as a graduate trainee at Just Eat - the meal delivery service. The first couple of months she had to walk the streets knocking on doors of restaurants, trying to get them to sign up. What great training.
When I spent a day with a pharmaceutical sales rep, customer responses varied hugely. One general practitioner had stopped prescribing a particular brand, because of a scare story from another country, so needed more data from clinical trials. The very next one had prescribed so much - thousands of pounds in a quarter - that she pleaded for a price reduction.
So if you’re not being customer-centric, what ‘centric’ are you being?
CEO-centric? Can you really say that each business decision is taken with the customer front of mind?
What are the consequences of not being customer-centric? According to PWC, one in three retail customers will leave a brand they love, after just one bad experience. We’ve all heard that it’s easier and more cost-effective to keep an existing customer than acquire a new one. In 2014, the Harvard Business Review found that acquiring a new customer is anywhere from five to 25 times more expensive than retaining an existing one. Ouch.
So how do you become more customer-centric?
Some things will have to change. It might not be easy to get buy-in. The message might get mangled. What might be some unhelpful things people say to colleagues?
- ‘Do this now, because it’s more customer-centric - you schmuck!’
- ‘I’m not doing that for you, because I’m doing something else which is more customer-centric.’
‘Hey, make me a cup of coffee then I can be more customer-centric.’
’Hey, dude. Let’s just feel it. Let’s not call it customer-centricity, let’s call it “Custo-Centro”’.
So should everyone shout at each other every five minutes, ‘Hey I’m being customer-centric’? Should you get t-shirts printed - ‘I’m being Custo Centro’?
You should ask if each decision you make is customer-centric or not.
How will this new benefit the customer?
Is this new back-office system actually going to make interactions with the customer easier?
Will this new process reduce frustration for our customer?
Another challenge is data silos. In many companies data is duplicated or unorganised or hiding in a dusty digital corner that nobody knows about. I’ve learnt recently that it’s not how much data you have that matters but how it flows around the organisation. Think of it like irrigation on a farm. You may a full reservoir but is the water flowing to your most productive crops?
How do we overcome the barriers to customer-centricity?
It’s all very setting as a goal (or even ‘strategy’) but think what does it mean to the people who may not actually interact with customers?
- Everyone needs to ‘get it’ - from the board to data analysts to traditional client-facing folk.
- Listen to the market: your customers, your rivals and even your suppliers, They may say a variety of things but look for patterns.
- Spot employees who are already meeting the needs of the customer. Empower them to be able to do more.
The old way may have been to keep information to yourself. Or thinking that you know enough based on previous experience or internal dialogue. Your company ‘wrote the script’. Now it’s about co-creating the conversation; finding new ways of doing things; to really work with and listen to people outside.
In the pharmaceutical industry, for example, they have integrated medicine, tele-health, healthcare partnerships and patient forums, giving sophisticated feedback in real time. It’s changed the way patients understand their disease, and how they can cope with it. One great example is making the blister pack or bottle easier to open. You may have the most sophisticated bio-chemistry in your drug but what if the patients can’t get to it?
Customer-Centricity is a must-have, when customers are more informed and more active. They have a stronger voice and they can share information with others in seconds.
You may not even know that potential customers are put off by something outside your control. You don’t know where they will notice you. Will it be the right impression? Has your customer interacted with your brand before you’ve even made a move? Online chats, reviews, stories …it all means you cannot know, let alone control, what customers may be feeling about you.
To be truly customer-centric ask yourself two questions:
- What must you STOP doing? What must you do LESS of?
- What must you START doing? What must you do MORE of?
People buy from people they trust. Even if they’ve not met you. They do business with a company, and may care little for which department, or ‘function’ or ‘capability’ or ‘service line’ it is.
If I go back to my improv training, the main skill is listening. It’s all about using your expertise to co-create the story with, and delighting, your customers.
Here’s a little video about customer service