Dick Lee
Dick Lee
Author & speaker Dick Lee has been encouraging customer-centric business practices for over 30 years. In his latest book "We Are Buyers. You Are Sellers. You're Busted." he changes focus to encouraging customers to fight back against abusive sellers.
Customer-Centric Process Design is Clashing with Organizational Design: Which is more likely to “give?”
Most organizations are designed from the top down: determining the management structure first, typically using traditional silo roles; divvying up among silos responsibility for...
Is Putting Customers First Disruptive Change?
Based both on a macro view of today's markets plus lots of ground-level observations, I'd estimate 95% of companies say they put customer interests...
Do we pay enough attention to emergency processes involving customers?
I confess – I often don't. But responding to emergencies requires thoroughly thought out process that mobilizes the right resources the right way at...
What’s the consequence for marketing, sales & service of poor business/IT communication?
For sure, communication has improved over the past 10 years. The "cold war" has ended, and the two sides are talking. However, this dialog...
Should we strike a balance between giving customers what they want and giving them what they’ll come to value?
Giving customers what they want the way they want it often does them no favors. In particular, providing customers immediate gratification often comes at...
Why Can’t Business Streamline Front & Back Office Operations?
The latest McKinsey Quarterly reports new data that should upset those designing organizations and managing operations in O/S (office/service) settings. While manufacturing managed to...
What’s the “Secret Sauce” that Lets Only Some Companies Go Outside-In & Put Customers First?
Lior Arussy from the Customer Experience side of business just relayed an interesting observation in a Customer Experience Group (Linkedin) post?that executives frequently claim...
Why Would Wells Fargo Betray Its HSA Customers?
As business professionals, you must recognize that building and maintaining customer trust creates more value for the corporation than any product or service. That's...
How Do 60 Minute Wait Times & 10% Unemployment Relate?
Believe me, I'm not trying to use Wells Fargo as a whipping boy. But when customer service gets this intolerably bad, someone in San...
The Lunacy of Cost-Cutting by Cutting Costs
A new McKinsey study reports: "Only 10% of cost-reduction programs sustain their results three years on." What goes wrong? Two things. Companies either: 1.)...
A Threat to Outside-In (Customer-Centricity): Left intact, inside-out organizational design can undo it all
Companies that achieve a significant measure of Outside-In, customer-centricity are at constant risk of "organizational memory" snapping them back or pulling them back to...
When Jules Verne Wrote “20,000 Leagues Under the Sea,” Did He invent the Submarine? (and we really are talking...
Through my travels across Linkedin groups, I've read (and received) innumerable comments saying this approach or activity or that was started by ____________ in...
Are Outside-In Practitioners Becoming Overconfident of Their Future?
Hey – I’ve been through this entirely too many times. At the start of the relationship marketing movement; when B2B database marketing got serious;...
Eight Reasons You Should Never, Never, Never Buy Anything From HP
We used to be a 100% HP office. Now we're down to 1 multi-function printer (that we'd ditch if it was used more than...
Can You Lump Customer-Centric, Outside-In Process Together with BPM?
The first question back from most will be: "How do you define BPM?" True to my proclivity for defining terms including "BPM" by their...
Redesigning Customer Process Requires Cross-Functional Teams… Including HR
For a long time, process redesign consisted of process experts reviewing work; going away and redesigning the work; then returning to tell workers how...
What Happens When New Thinking Threatens the Value of Your Marketing or Process Skill Sets?
When business conditions and contexts change in ways that require significant professional adaptation, most managers go in one of two directions, with a small...
In Office/Service Process, Can You Focus on One Customer-Related Activity or Function at a Time?
I'll be uncharacteristically direct expressing my opinion. Here's an example of why you can't. A new financial services client had invested lots of effort...
Can We Measure the Outcomes of Improving Customer-Facing Process?
Please, no comments like "You can't manage what you can't measure." That's bunk. Always has been. Always will be. And to support my harsh...
Pragmatically speaking, which plays the dominant role: customer culture influencing work or work influencing customer culture?
We're all schooled to think of culture as something instituted top-down – just as we're schooled to think that our inner psyche drives our...