It’s useful to work towards a more formal definition, which includes details of the actual processes whereby Customer Centricity can be achieved. But this is more useful if we first set Customer Centricity in context as a business strategy today.
The essential mindset behind Customer Centricity isn’t new. Visit the open market at Marrakech in Morocco - or any other busy marketplace in the world, for that matter - and you’ll see the concept of Customer Centricity at work, at least at the most successful stalls. It has, in effect, been around since the very dawn of business.
Our modern economy is more sophisticated than the market at Marrakech, though the need for making customers feel special is no less paramount. Our modern business economy likes to relate new strategic concepts to old ones, and so Customer Centricity is increasingly regarded as both a descendant and replacement for Customer Relationship Management (CRM), which many regard as a failed concept.
Whether or not you yourself agree that CRM was a failure, it’s difficult, really, to be convinced that the CRM approach of regarding quality customer service as something you can instil in an organisation merely by installing a (very expensive) piece of software is really going to work unless you are very lucky, or were being highly customer centric already. The problem with CRM systems is that they tend to paper over an organisation’s deficiencies in the area of customer service.
This causes a double problem: there is less return on the large investment in the CRM system than might otherwise have been the case, and the underlying problems go unresolved. If Customer Centricity is regarded today as the strategy for re-orientating one’s entire organisation around the need to look after customers better, and if CRM itself has fallen by the wayside, it really only has itself to blame.
Another idea that has fallen by the wayside in the light of the disappointing results of many CRM implementations is the notion that you can solve a strategic challenge on the scale of keeping customers really happy merely by the implementation of some software. That idea dies hard, but only because it is an attractive and appealing idea to organisations that, at heart, don’t really want to change.
Customer Centricity, however, does not come packaged in a box. It isn’t something you can just pay someone to install and then go back to going about your business pretty well as you did before. Instead, Customer Centricity is an entire strategy for running your organisation so that you focus every aspect of what you do around the needs of your customers.
As we define Customer Centricity formally at my firm, the business and IT consultancy Charteris plc., it is the alignment of organisational structure, processes and technology to deliver products and services to internal and external customers in the most agile way.
Note that, in this definition, the technology angle is just one part of the story. And perhaps the most important point to make about Customer Centricity is that to become customer centric an organisation really does need to look hard at crucial factors such as its culture, processes and ways of doing things before it brings in new technology that is designed to facilitate Customer Centricity. Becoming customer centric is not just an item on the agenda of a Board meeting, it is the agenda.
It’s also, in case you might have forgotten, why you’re in business in the first place.
Successful organisations, whether in the private or public sector, all have one thing in common. They have all found a way, or ways, of consistently winning from customers a level of loyalty and willingness to buy again that in effect amounts to a reliable mandate from customers who are attracted to what the business has to offer.
The business, of course, will want those customers to keep being attracted by what is on offer, and for the number of customers who are attracted to increase. Essentially, Customer Centricity is a way of disciplining - in the most positive sense - the entire organisation to ensure that it is as good at looking after its customers and winning and maintaining new customer mandates and new levels of loyalty from customers as it possibly can be.
So what does it really mean in practice? How do you actually ‘do’ Customer Centricity at your organisation?
We can gain an important insight into these two vital questions by observing that, in practice, many organisations have Customer Centricity by the bucket load when they start up, but actually lose it over time.
Why do they lose it? Generally, because they lose focus, lose stamina, get complacent and get lazy.
When organisations first start trading they usually (and certainly should) have the very clearest idea what they are in business to do, who does what, and why. Every person involved in a start-up will most likely know how they add value to the finished product or service and whom they need to work with internally to make sure the best service or product is delivered to their new customers. They will know this because looking after the customer is so completely why they set up the business in the first place.
But then, if the new business succeeds, it will grow. To start with, as it grows, the founders and the new staff may be able to keep alive the flame that embodies the spirit of why they are in business. But sooner or later, somewhere along the line, the flame will diminish or even go out completely, as the clarity of why you are in business fades. Once that clarity starts to fade, Customer Centricity fades with it.
Why does this happen? There are many reasons, indeed every organisation that suffers this problem will probably have to some extent a unique set of reasons why it happens.
To speak generally, one has to say that as organisations grow in size a curious effect almost invariably occurs. Staff members start to look inward, worry about their own internal departmental issues and become more and more remote from the actual agenda of the customer. Staff begin to create internal processes and agendas that have little - or may indeed have nothing at all - to do with adding value to the external customer. It’s common for whole new business areas and departments to be created to deal with and manage these internal issues.
Yes, of course an organisation that is getting bigger, maybe very big, needs internal departments if is going to function properly. An organisation consisting of half a dozen people doesn’t need a Human Resources department or an IT department. An organisation with (say) more than 75 people certainly will need these departments. And so the departments are created.
People don’t just work for money. People work for job satisfaction, too. Generally speaking, people prefer to do a good day’s work than a bad day’s work. People like taking some action that directly or indirectly involves them looking after customers because it makes them feel that they’re doing a good job.
The trouble is, too many large organisations forget this, and don’t give their staff the opportunities or encouragement to look after customers properly. This problem applies particularly to staff working in internal departments that don’t have a direct interface to customers, though it often applies to customer-facing departments, too. And because people in those internal departments perceive that the organisation doesn’t empower them to take steps to understand their role in looking after customers, they start to drift and lose focus at a motivational level.
This often goes hand-in-hand with (and is in fact frequently caused by) a peculiar form of amnesia that makes organisations forget that every internal department should be an essential element in a ‘chain’ of organisational resources aligned to allow the organisation to do its very best for its customers.
The best way, indeed the only way, really, to ensure that you deliver what the external customer really wants is to make sure that each step in your customer chain adds value to whatever is eventually delivered to the paying customer.
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