What C3 Partners’ core business philosophy – analysing Voice, Gap, Change – really means

I and C3 Partners base our core business philosophy on the perception that helping  client organisations maximise the extent to which they are customer-centric is all about the client organisation:

a) listening to its customer’s voice; 

b) understanding the gap between that voice and the organisation’s view of the customer; 

c) effecting the change which closes the gap. 

Organisation’s customers have never had more power – and that power continues to grow. Yet in reality, the customer voice all too often receives too little attention from organisations. Instead, organisations pay too much attention to their own hypotheses and assumptions about customers. 

It can be flattering for organisations to imagine that their own insights are more significant than what their customers say and think about them, but organisations are, in truth, better off not seeking to feel flattered, but rather trying to find out the reality about what their customers think of them and want from them.

C3 Partners has a customer-centred methodology that focuses directly on what the client organisation’s customers really think of it. This methodology fosters the creation of a structured and honest dialogue with customers that is intimate, honest and which builds a true picture of what customers really value about the organisation.

Next, C3 Partners applies powerful classifications, analysis and visualisation tools to building a clear picture of the gap that exists between what customers really want from the organisation and what the organisation is currently delivering to them.

These two closely related steps of understanding the customer’s voice and getting a clear picture of the gap go a long way towards revealing the real customer-centred state of the organisation, establishing the ‘Customer as a Compass’ to guide a truly customer-centred strategy.

C3 Partners’ Customer Centred Framework anchors the vital themes that emerge from the Voice process onto the core organisational dimensions of: people and behaviours; organisation structure; process, and technology.

Building on the outcomes of the voice process, C3 Partners use the customer as a compass to inform and guide all gap activity. This ensures that the truth of the customer view is ever-present, enabling clarity, focus and simplicity in decision making.

The gap analysis embraces strategy, policy, process, activity, metrics and skills. C3 Partners examine behaviours and culture – determining readiness and blockers to change. This informs the evaluation of practical change options, balancing impact and cost. The result is a customer-centred strategy with broad organisational buy-in. 

The strategy is developed into a roadmap that prioritises highest impact customer-centred change actions, with appropriately managed levels of risk.

Extensive practical experience at C3 Partners has shown that a well-planned and well-executed customer-centred change programme can deliver a highly significant return on investment and transform competitive advantage. It is often the case that the work we undertake for our client organisations has such a powerful positive effect on their relationship with their customer that our work pays for itself, and not just once but many times over.

A customer-centred change programme turns customers into advocates and can create new and powerful alignment throughout the client organisation – making the customers’ voice and the customers’ needs a kind of bloodline that runs throughout the client organisation and which continually inspires and guides fresh levels of enhanced Customer Centricity within it.

C3 Partners designs and delivers customer-centred change programmes that achieve the strategic objectives of our clients’ customer-centred strategies, to drive maximum Return on Investment and leading to enduring competitive advantage for the client organisation