Christopher Brown
How do you get employees to care about customers?
This is a question I often hear from leaders of large companies that want to create customer centered organizations. It is one of the key challenges of becoming customer centric. Here are a couple of ideas that we have seen work well. Recalling your own Personal Customer…
78 Years of Customer’s Trust Destroyed in an Instant
Source: The Economist One of the most dramatic instances of breaking a promise to customers came during this past week as VW admitted to deliberately misleading regulators and customers about its car exhaust emissions. More than 11 million vehicles had been fitted with software designed…
What does Customer Centric Leadership look like?
Source: Evan Carmichaelhttps://www.youtube.com/channel/UCKmkpoEqg1sOMGEiIysP8Tw There is plenty of research and anecdotal evidence that tells us if customers believe “we care” about what we sell them, how we serve them and the relationships we create with them, they will remain loyal advocates of our company. This also...
Empowering Employees to do the right thing for customers
When we measure the customer-centric culture of organizations around the world, one of the recurring themes is a low score on “empowerment”. Lack of empowerment – real or perceived – has a huge impact on the ability of frontline staff to solve a customer’s problem....
What sport can teach us about customer centricity
Sporting clubs refer to their customers as fans. This is an appropriate term because “fan” is shortened from “fanatic”. Successful sporting teams have fanatical supporters who are typically lifelong supporters of their sporting club and team. Take the Seattle Seahawks, a professional American football franchise...
A ‘Value’ Mindset is at the Heart of Customer Centricity
Andrew Kakabadse, Professor of Governance and Leadership at Henley Business School, UK, carried out in-depth interviews with leaders in more than 100 private and public organizations around the world to identify what is required for organizations and leaders to be successful. He came to...
Transforming IT is Crucial to Customer Centricity
The explosion of digital technologies and acceleration of innovation is bringing IT into the center of the business – not because of IT itself, but because of its impact on customer experience and the business. CIOs are demanding their teams turn their attention away...
Customer Centricity Requires Resilient Leadership
In practice, a customer-centric culture requires people in organizations to be able to adapt to change and provide new forms of value to their customers as an ongoing approach to doing business. Sustainable change demands resilient leaders at all levels of an organization. Resilience...
Why Collaboration is Key to a Customer-Centric Culture
In our work with large corporations around the world we find that many of them are challenged by a siloed internal environment that works against a collaborative customer focused culture. Yet we know how important cross-functional collaboration is to driving value for customers that...
Why are Tesco, McDonald’s and Woolworths Supermarkets Losing their Leadership Positions?
Tesco, the British based supermarket chain, has shocked analysts with an overstatement of profit expectations by 250 million pounds and questions have been raised about accounting irregularities. This problem reflects an underlying decline in its market position. McDonald’s, the dominant American fast food chain for...
3 reasons why customer centricity’s time has come
The world of business has rapidly transformed over the past 15 years. From a world where businesses controlled supply, controlled the message and could dictate terms to customers to one where customers have a much louder and more influential voice. While we have always been advocates of...
Amazon’s customer centric moment of truth
Image credit: Steve Jurvetson/Flickr I have been a fan of Amazon.com for many years, in fact I wrote extensively about them in my new book, the Customer Culture Imperative. However some recent news about some of their practices have caused me to pause and question whether…
How Zappos makes sure customers get a great experience everytime
You see countless articles every day that claim improving a single part of your customer service strategy is the "key" to something. Experts promise how listening to your customers, delivering more timely service, improving employee training and many other things offer a path to...
Why empowerment and trust are crucial to creating great customer experiences
Many of the most-used customer service buzzwords focus on delighting the customer, proactively providing a good experience or making a personal and emotional connection – but what about trust? How would your business's customer experiences benefit from trusting your employees a bit more?...
How DollarShaveClub.com created a disruptive customer experience
If you think about what's happening in the men's shaving razor market it's a little like a cold war era arms race. Each year more and more blades are added to the humble razor. The giants of the industry Gillette and Schick continue to...
The Customer Insight Lab of the Future
Telstra, Australia's largest telecommunications company, like other large organizations has a powerful research, analytics and insights hub. Liz Moore, who heads that group in Telstra says "You need deep seated curiosity to develop insights." So she has hired people with those characteristics and developed an…
How stupid companies hold their customers hostage
It never ceases to amaze me how some companies continue to make it hard for customers to leave. As though making it difficult for customers to leave will make them want to stay. Why do you think businesses continue with such short sighted...
5 Ways to Start Transforming Your Customer Demand Generation Process
It looks like 2013 could be "The Year of the Marketer," according to the CMO Council. Their recent "State of Marketing Audit" results revealed that CMOs are reporting a strongly positive outlook on the role of marketing in 2013. However, it will take a lot...
Get more customer insights with these 5 questions
If you want really insightful information from your customers, try asking these 5 open-ended questions: What is the one thing you think we do really well? This question will help you identify what customers really like about doing business with you. You may have your…
Is this the end of in-store customer service and retailing as we know it?
You would think traditional retailers when confronted with the undermining of their traditional in store purchasing business models would be reaching out for new ways to create value for their customers…… Although most retailers agree delivering a superior in-store experience will rescue the physical store...