In this week’s blog post, I share four more strategies for making customer centric culture change less painful and more successful for your organization: enlisting and leveraging heroes and allies; hiring for cultural fit; using education and training; and involving your customers.
Create Allies and Heroes
Share far and wide the successes of the people involved in change efforts, making them “heroes” and examples for the rest of the organization to emulate. Make allies of leadership all the way up to the executive committee. In so doing, the CCO leverages greater Borrowed Authority and greater Earned Authority to continue making changes in other parts of the organization.
Hire for cultural fit
The CCO should define the characteristics of individuals who are most likely to embrace cultural change to gain customer centricity. Hiring managers can include those characteristics as part of the employee evaluation criteria.
Educate and inform
Every new employee training should include a presentation by the CCO, providing clear and consistent expectations of the employee’s contribution to customer centricity. Share case studies of employee and client successes on company intranets. Leverage departmental and company-wide meetings to reinforce key messages and content, share feedback on progress toward change goals, and to reward exemplary staff.
Involve customers
Where appropriate, invite customers to tell their story personally or convey their expectations and experience through video or case study. Consider bringing disgruntled customers to meet with key executives, engineers, or support staff. Making the customers real personalizes the customer centricity imperative and leads to much stronger employee commitment.
Customer service and even customer experience are only a small part of becoming customer centric. You need to engage every employee in the business of serving customers. Using these seven strategies will help you as a CCO to overcome resistance to change, create a powerful customer-centric culture, and drive more profitable business results.
*This two-part series on customer centric cultural change has been excerpted from The Bingham Advisory: Eight Imperatives for the Chief Customer Officer, available for free download here.
