The right way to do the right thing for the customer

Did you know that in most organisations, between 50 and 70 percent of internal effort expended doesn’t, in fact, add any value to what the organisation is achieving for its customers? These research findings seem - and are - alarming. But when you consider what people say about the calibre of customer service they receive from many organisations, perhaps the findings are not especially surprising.

The question is, what can be done to improve the situation?

Very likely nobody knows for certain the secret of creating a successful business. Businesspeople who have achieved success enjoy writing autobiographies in which they tell the stories of their business life. They usually imply they saw everything coming and that basically their success story was pre-ordained, apart perhaps from an occasional brief hiccup here and there.
Can we ever really learn very much of practical usefulness from business celebrities’ autobiographies? Probably not, because these books don’t usually acknowledge the point that every successful business has to some extent been fortunate in that it was doing whatever it was doing at just the right time. The secret of business success is a secret, and having the 20/20 vision of hindsight is a completely different thing from knowing it.

Fortunately, though, there are some extremely useful underlying strategies floating about that can take you far along the Yellow Brick Road to your own personal pot of business gold. Some of these strategies are more faddy than others. Some are too faddy for their own good. But the best ones offer you powerful new ways of getting real clarity on the ideas, approaches and tactics that can lead to success beyond even your most optimistic expectations.

One of the most useful, interesting, empowering and transforming strategies in the business world today is Customer Centricity. What’s great about Customer Centricity is that it’s unpretentious, unfaddy, unjargonistic and generally un all the things that can be so annoying about managementspeak and ‘flavour of the month’ management concepts.

Customer Centricity brings you back to basics. It brings you back into intimate contact with the reasons why you decided to set up a business - or work in a particular industry - in the first place.

Indeed, one of the insights so often liberated by the new types of thinking inspired by Customer Centricity is that it’s too easy, in the hubbub of corporate and professional life, to forget those reasons.

This forgetfulness can apply to anyone at an organisation. Senior executives, and even Board members, are far from being immune to it.

Yet Customer Centricity, properly deployed, is much more than a mere antidote to this forgetfulness. At its best, Customer Centricity can transform an organisation into being everything the organisation can be, but which it can so easily fail to be.

The role of Customer Centricity in business today is still evolving. All the same, we do need a working definition, and an informal definition might be the process of ensuring that every individual and department within an organisation is taking every step feasible to add value to what the organisation does for its customers.