Customer focus is not just about customer service or only about the frontline of an organization.
Every individual needs to translate what customer focus means to them in their role
Here are the 3 ingredients necessary to get started:
1. Identify your customers, who are the people inside or outside the business you are creating value for?
Every role has a customer, you may not think of your colleagues or internal departments as customers but this is a good way to get into the customer mindset. Just imagine for a moment that your colleagues were paying you for your services directly, how would that change your behavior?
2. Review your work streams, what do you do for them?
What services do you provide? Which of those create the most value? Do your customers recognize the value of those services?
3. Get feedback and refine your work, do they value what you do? How can you improve the value of your work?
For example does the sales department value the lead generation process developed by the marketing team? If not why not? What can be done to improve it? How about the reporting provided by finance? Is it meeting the needs of marketing and so on. The internal processes and interactions between departments matter.
For a company to be truly customer focused it must start on the inside.
We have a simple free tool to help you map this called the Personal Customer Value Map.
It will only take 15 minutes but it will give you some new insights into how you work with customers and ideas on how to improve.
