Although far from a majority, the percentage of companies with customer-centric strategies continues rising. But then what? Well, in so many cases what comes next is a major disconnect. Once the customer-centric intent is established, next should come customer-centric process redesign (including designing enabling technology) that should change intent into action.
Unfortunately, what does happen instead is process design that covers its cost-control roots with a customer fig leaf. Companies wheel out production-based process schemas practiced by production-trained process designers and get production-based process – that adds only tangential benefits to customers.
Personally, I’d rather train process untrained people in the principles of customer-centric process and turn them loose, rather than bring in the Lean/Six Sigma troops. What do you think?
FYI, here’s a link to an excellent CustomerThink post addressing this issue by Joseph Drager (http://preview.tinyurl.com/3coz39a). I’ve added my 2 cents.