Maximizing growth means starting with alignment in your corporate strategy and customer experience strategy. Otherwise, you’re robbing investors of growth.
Highly aligned companies see:1
58% faster revenue growth
+ 72% higher profit
+ 2.2X customer retention
+ 3.2X customer satisfaction
+ 8.7X effective leadership
+ 16.8X engaged employees
Highly aligned companies = 85th percentile for employees that:1
a) Clearly understand the business strategy.
b) Believe they can implement the strategy successfully in their unique circumstances.
c) Understand and agree with performance expectations.
And d) Believe they have unfettered access to resources necessary to succeed in their jobs.
(LSA Global’s research of 410 companies across 8 industries).1
Customer Alignment multiplies all growth metrics
“We aligned the entire company around our collective imperative: customer success. Customers are at the center of everything we do, and our success is directly tied to their success.” — Ingrid Estrada, Chief Administrative Officer, Keysight Technologies.2
Customer-aligned advantages at Keysight:
4X market capitalization since 2019.2
+ 50% shorter productization, from 3 years to 18 months.2
+ 11 acquisitions over the past 5 years.2
+ 500% total shareholder return, outpacing the S&P 500.3
+ Forbes America’s Best Employers for Diversity.4
+ Dow Jones Sustainability Index North America (6th consecutive year).4
+ 92% of employees recommend Keysight as a great place to work.5
(Keysight is the world’s largest electronic design and test company, formerly part of Agilent (2014) and Hewlett-Packard (1999).)
Note that “customer success” mentioned above is broader than the department called Customer Success.
— The department focuses on recurring revenue.
— “Customers’ success” in the quote above focuses on customer prosperity as the strongest pathway to your company’s continued prosperity.
True customer experience management is alignment strategy
This article is 3rd in a 5-part series: Executives’ Guide to Customer Experience Value.
— Key points for your reference:
What’s CX vs. CXM (from part 1: Revenue Risks)
What’s CXM vs. Experiential Marketing (from part 2: High Potential)
Table of Contents:
A) Customer Alignment Reality Checks
B) High-Growth Customer Alignment
C) 7×7 Customer Alignment
Customer Alignment is not to be confused with:
— Strategy execution.
— Enticing customers’ behavior.
— Account Management or Customer Success.
— Digital transformation.
— Customer-facing roles’ alignment.
Customer Alignment syncs your enterprise with customers’ aims
Why?
a) Anything that bothers customers creates a spiral of costs.
b) Customers pay for your salaries, budgets, and profit-sharing.
c) Investors leave when customers leave, not vice versa.
d) Any role’s decision that is out of sync with customers’ aims can create a fiasco.
e) Employees in sync with customers are more likely to create value customers will continually reward.
Customer Alignment Reality-Checks
“Alignment” is still a poorly understood and weakly practiced success factor in every managerial field, industry, and country.
Actual alignment may be 2X to 3X lower than perceived alignment.6
How aligned is your company to its corporate strategy?
82% said they “feel aligned”.
23% were in actual alignment, based on analysis of their detailed written explanations about their company’s strategies.
(Study reported in Harvard Business Review of more than 500 frontline employees, middle managers, and senior executives across 12 different organizations.)
Typical alignment advice is siloed:
“Real growth looks like the fundamentals done really well:
a) create buyer value,
b) align marketing, sales and product teams, and
c) leverage technology.”7
“A customer-obsessed strategy …
makes customer value the North Star
of technology planning.”8
2.4X higher revenue growth and 2X higher profit growth are gained by:
“enterprises with high levels of alignment
across customer-facing functions such as marketing, CX, and digital.”9
Non-customer-facing roles create or limit value
Every role company-wide helps or hurts customer experience and business value:
While siloed alignment is clearly better than no alignment, you’re short-changing investors and customers when alignment is siloed.
Summary of 2024 CX West Conference:
“The articulated goal of customer-centricity is far out in front of the operational practice of Customer Success.”10
“Every function that touches the customer has a different idea of what it means to ‘score a goal’.”10
“Commercial operations are increasingly out of sync with the customer journey they support: . . . fragmented functional leadership, customer data, engagement channels, systems, operations, and revenue teams.”10
“The key message from every panel was this: The revenue team that connects the most dots wins the customer.”10
Command-and-control Customer Success alignment limits value.
— Over-focus on touchpoints only.
— Touchpoint costs rise as non-customer-facing roles are out-of-sync.
— Rising costs mean less budget available for growth.
— Customers buy your product, not your touchpoint.
— Product + policies + processes + handoffs internally = experiences externally.
Customer Alignment is like a world-class sports team
1) All players — and managers — keep their eye on the ball.
Ball = customers’ prosperity.
2) All players are synchronized.
Players = every role in your enterprise.
Goal = Customers’ prosperity as everyone’s path to prosperity = unity and agility.
High-Growth Customer Alignment
Alignment to customers “was a major pivot that has:
a) significantly increased the enterprise value of the firm and
b) positioned us with a greater competitive moat while
c) giving employees more opportunities to make meaningful contributions,”
said Ingrid Estrada, Chief Administrative Officer at Keysight.2
Start with customer insights to maximize growth
For Customer Alignment strategy — and corporate strategy:
1) Who are your core-growth customers?
2) What are their ultimate aims?
3) Embed this into everything your Senior Leadership Team does.
4) Cascade this throughout your enterprise, and among partners.
“If we have the right market insights and allocate our capital properly, we can deliver first-to-market solutions that our customers truly need, when they need them,” explained Ron Neresian, Keysight Executive Chairman since 2019. “In addition, we drive operational excellence in everything we do to ensure our company is run as efficiently and effectively as possible. And we enable the growth of our employees, who make it all happen, with new career opportunities, training, and challenging work.”5
Ultimate aims of your customers are 2 to 3 overall themes
What are they pursuing in their life or business via your type of solution?
When you keep this simple, it’s easy for all roles (even non-customer-facing) to ask themselves daily:
a) Will this help or hurt customers’ prosperity?
b) How could this maximize customers’ prosperity?
“The company and employees have faced significant business disruptions and challenges in the past few years—from wildfires to COVID-19”, said Estrada. “And through them all, our North Star has been our commitment to customer success. Our employees are motivated by the meaningful and purposeful work they are doing on behalf of customers to accelerate innovation to connect and secure the world.”2
Beware of confusing Customer Alignment with North Star Product Framework.11
a) North Star Metric for Product Management is defined as when customers reach their end result.
Example: “For the fitness app, a key result could be increasing the number of active users who complete their fitness routines by 10% within a quarter.”11
b) North Star for Customer Alignment enterprise-wide is a show-stopper theme that shapes your customers’ decisions across their end-to-end journey (life cycle).
Example: Simplicity and Timeliness are the show-stopper themes of a certain firm.
Whenever timeliness is missed for 1 customer segment, they’re more inclined to disengage (moments of truth). Same for the simplicity segment.
Within these 2 overall segments are many tactical sub-segments (high vs. low volume, residential vs. industrial, etc.) for adapting promotional tactics, etc.
Customer Experience is how you run your business
Same for Employee Experience. And Investor Experience.
Discover their show-stopper theme (their ultimate aim) as the primary input for how you manage everything across your enterprise.
For the strongest results, find the intersection of show-stopper themes across your high-potential customers, employees, partners, and investors (in this hierarchy).
“We operate with uncompromising integrity, said Neresian, Keysight Chairman. We do what’s right, every time. . . . We have high expectations and strong results ownership, so we always deliver the highest levels of performance. . . . We operate as One Keysight. This means we bring the entire organization to bear when solving customer problems and driving results for our shareholders.”5
7×7 Customer Alignment
There are 7 P’s for Customer Alignment
1) Products
2) Policies
3) Processes
4) Plans
5) People
6) Partners
7) Performance
When any of these are not aligned with customers, it causes unnecessary costs.
There are 7 dimensions for the 7 P’s
Customer Alignment Maturity:
1) Decisions: guided by customers’ ultimate aim?
2) Development: starts with customer insights?
3) Reviews: first agenda item is Customer Alignment?
4) Rewards: prevention and teamwork for customers’ prosperity?
5) Scope: all 7 P’s for all work roles, no exceptions?
6) Scrutiny: managers see actual action plan, to remove roadblocks?
7) Root Cause Resolution: teams ask 5 Why’s and eradicate the 5th why?
7×7 Customer Alignment is the fastest and surest way to outpace norms of every kind.
When you focus on 7×7 Customer Alignment, you can skip a tremendous amount of expense currently known as “customer experience management“.
Why?
CXM today mainly makes up for lack of alignment
Gap-free experience between what’s promised vs. delivered:
a) Brand preference
b) Lowest costs
c) More budget for growth
7×7 Customer Alignment self-assessments quarterly by every department maximize cost savings. It frees up resources for untapped growth opportunities.
And this maximizes value for investors, partners, customers, and employees alike.
1 LSA 3x Organizational Alignment™ Research, LSA Global.
2 Driving Organizational Alignment Around New Growth Strategy, by Ingrid Estrada, Keysight Technologies, SHRM Executive Network, February 22, 2024.
3 Keysight Announces Executive Leadership Transition, BusinessWire, March 16, 2023.
4 Keysight Named to Dow Jones Sustainability Index for Sixth Year in a Row, Keysight.com.
5 Keysight Technologies: The Keysight Leadership Model, CEO Today Magazine, August 30, 2019.
6 Is Your Company as Strategically Aligned as You Think It Is?, by Vikas Mittal, Alessandro Piazza and Ashwin Malshe, Harvard Business Review, May 1, 2023.
7 Forrester Unveils Customer-Obsessed Growth Engine at Its B2B Summit, by John Ellett, Forbes, June 6, 2023.
8 Forrester: Customer Obsessed Companies Achieve 2.5X Greater Revenue, by Charlie Mitchell, CX Today, February 22, 2023.
9 The Alignment Toolkit For CX Leaders, Forrester.
10 Delivering Superior Customer Experience is a Team Sport, by Stephen Diori, Forbes, March 15, 2024.
11 The Ultimate Guide to the North Star Product Framework, by Jake Brereton, Launch Notes, September 28, 2023.
This is the second of a CustomerThink Advisors 5-part series: Executives’ Guide to Customer Experience Value.
Part 1) Revenue Risks
Part 2) High Potential
Part 3) Alignment
Part 4) Walking The Talk
Part 5) Top Tier Leadership