Dick Lee wrote a great blog about the leap of faith it often seems to require for CXOs to really embrace customer-centricity. Putting aside the lack of clarity of what customer-centricity actually is, we should all be concerned that CXOs have to effectively take a leap into the dark when adopting customer-centricity. And we shouldn’t be surprised when many of them decide not to. Institutional shareholders take a dim view of any CXO betting the business on something they can’t really define, they can’t really show how it will drive cashflow and they don’t really know how to get started.
And therein lies a huge problem, even for those CXOs who do know what customer-centricity is and how it drives value. There isn’t a well-documented roadmap that they can use to plan, to experiment with, to implement and eventually to make customer-centricity daily business. Without a roadmap, executives have to rely upon their own experiences, or those of consultants, who are great at selling the customer-centricity vision, but often have never implemented customer-centricity themselves.
I don’t have a roadmap either, despite consulting with a number of companies who most would consider to be pretty customer-centric. All I know is that becoming customer-centric is a long, hard slog that requires you to involve customers extensively all stages of the evolution towards customer-centricity, to radically reengingeer the business for flexible service delivery, to modularly redesign products so that they can be mass-customised for and by customers, and to be selective in choosing the most valuable customers you want to centre the organisation around.
Have YOU become customer-centric? Do YOU have a roadmap? Do let us know.
Post a response or email me at graham(dot)hill(at)web(dot)de to get the conversation going.
Graham Hill
Independent CRM Consultant
Interim CRM Manager
Further Reading
Dick Lee, It Takes a Leap of Faith (to Reach Customer Centricity)
http://www.customerthink.com/blog/it_takes_leap_faith_reach_customer_centricity
There are actually some great guidelines for customer-centricity, tried and true! My favorites include Jeanne Bliss’ Chief Customer Officer, Bernd Schmidt’s Customer Experience Management, Jay Galbraith’s Designing the Customer-Centric Organization, among others you can peruse in my media library at http://clearaction.biz/blog.
Lynn Hunsaker, http://www.ClearAction.biz, mentors executives for superior customer profitability by preventing customer hassles and churn.
Nice piece, Graham. As soon as I get a chance to write (and think), I’ll try to add some client experiences. Plus I want to take a look at Lynn Hunsaker’s sources. It would be nice to take a critical issue like “the roadmap” and see how far we can collectively push it.
Best,
Dick