In practice, within a large organisation it is almost inevitable that most of its departments will not be customer-facing. And here the very size of a large organisation can conspire against it being successful. The organisation needs to be certain, at all times, of what every individual person and every department is doing that adds value to the paying customer by providing top-quality products and services to customers directly or by doing things that directly facilitate the provision to customers.
After all, if any one individual or department is not involved in the chain, it needs to be asked what exactly they are doing in the organisation at all.
Again, I want to emphasise: people want to feel they are making a contribution to the organisation that employs them. We live in an age when the work ethic has for most people become not only a cultural imperative but also an important element in their self-esteem and self-respect.
Does anybody really want to go home after a day’s work thinking ‘I successfully managed to do as little as possible for our customers today’? Surely not. Yet organisations too often don’t take enough advantage of people’s inherent work ethic. How often have you heard people in the sales force complain, for example, that it’s too hard to change a particular administration process to meet a customer request? And how many times have you heard customers actively complain that an organisation’s new way of doing things seems deliberately contrived to drive them away?
The remedy is to achieve agility in how the organisation is run and how every element in the chain links together. Make sure everyone knows who their own key internal and external customers are, and what products and services each of them needs (and are prepared to pay for, in the case of external customers). Take steps to assess whether your customer chain is delivering products and services most effectively at the lowest cost.
Be ready to start making your organisation customer centric from first principles - possibly taking advice on how best to do this - and be adamant that you won’t paper over the cracks in those parts of your organisation that aren’t agile and flexible enough to demonstrate very clearly the role they play in the chain.
Above all, be honest. Prepare yourself for long-term incremental change. Build a group of stakeholders from all levels who understand the concept of Customer Centricity, what it requires and who can preach it to others.
Ultimately you will need to drive the Customer Centricity concept and principles throughout all aspects of the business including strategic vision, people, process, organisational structure, information and technology.
Yes, change is hard, but you can grow Customer Centricity within your organisation on a department by department basis: you don’t need to do it all at once. And when you are ready to implement the technology, you’ll find there is plenty of great technology out there - systems for Workflow management, Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP), databases management, Business Intelligence tools and so on - that will enable you to create your new-look organisation without delay.
Remember that deep down in your organisation the chain that will delight your customers - and your shareholders - very possibly already exists, obscured by internally focused organisation design, poor process, inappropriately deployed technology and lack of vision.
Liberate it, and enjoy the brightest tomorrow you can imagine.
An eight-point plan for maximising Customer Centricity within your organisation:
Identify who your primary and secondary customers are.
Identify the products and services they consume and through which channels (web, call centre, bricks and mortar and so on).
Work out where the crucial ‘points of addition’ occur in adding value to those products and services.
Make sure each of the business areas involved in these points of addition know how they - the business areas - add value to these products and services.
Align the organisational structure to support these points of addition.
Minimise the activities that don’t add value to what the customer is getting from the organisation.
Ensure that the correct measurements maintain and improve the processes.
Support where appropriate with technology solutions.
Stephen Hewett leads Customer Centricity work at Charteris. To learn more please call 020 7600 9199 or email stephen.hewett@charteris.com.
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