Creating a customer-centric organization

Not everyone in an organization faces the customer. This should come as no surprise to anyone, with more and more automation in the customer touchpoints, that number is shrinking.

The challenge then becomes, how do you create a customer-centric organization within an organization where not everyone faces the customer?

One of the first things to remember is everyone sees the customer differently.?

Starting from the most customer-facing roles, let’s review the salesperson. For them, the customer is the job. Bringing in new customers, ensuring they are supplied and serviced, willing to buy more in the future, act as a reference to other customers, and, equally important, parting with cash when making a purchase, is their job. Convincing a salesperson that the customer is important should not be hard.?

The next most customer-facing role is service and support. Supplying the customer, delivering on that promise is their job. Many times they view themselves as much a part of their customer’s organization as their employer, given how much time they spend with their customer as opposed to on internal matters.?

The bigger challenge arises when building that customer-centric logic “in the walls” of the organization.?

Let’s start the next level inward - administrative customer-facing tasks. Accounts Receivable, Order Entry, Shipping/Logistics, Legal, etc. This is where the challenge begins, as typically they only become involved with customers upfront - for example, negotiating contracts and setting up invoicing systems, and thereafter when problems occur within those contracts or payments. This can be a challenge as the customer can be perceived as creating the problem. Yet, in the same, these touchpoints are critical to the customer experience and an investment in the customer’s future lifetime value to the company.

Then there is the product management and product development. Typically, these departments align with customers by documenting and solving the “customer requirements”. Those customer requirements include high-level functional requirements, later broken down into engineering work packages to be solved through engineering efforts.?

There is an implicit challenge in the process of gathering customer requirements. Typically, the “voice of the customer” is gathered and aggregated into a standard requirement (note, this does not apply to bespoke/customer solutions). This standard requirement is there to match some aggregated average, distilled down to a smaller set of functionalities to meet these requirements and bring a product to market. These are sometimes called the Minimum Viable Product (MVP).?

Many people I know and respect hate the term MVP as it can be misconstrued as giving the mininum effort for a customer. I fully agree it should not be used in that context. I'll keep using the term for lack of a better one used in industry (maybe Market Acceptable Product?)

The MVP meets the needs of some, but not all, potential customers. Think of this as a large Venn diagram with dozens, if not hundreds, of variations of overlap or lack of overlap. Smaller MVPs develop tangential to the requirements of smaller subsets of customer overlapping requirements.

In marketing terms this forms the basis of Customer Segmentation.

In a competitive market, competitors will try to define the product using a slightly different section of the overlapping needs. This process works to evolve a mass-market product to satisfy more and more customers when more features are added, or helps a smaller market product serve the needs of a niche segment.?

When used incorrectly, this is one place where the customer centric view can break down inside the walls of the organization.?

As an example, the Sales team find a customer, they listen to their unique needs, and they try to get the organization to meet those unique needs. Each sale is to one customer, not the generic MVP profile customer. A competitor may be better matched in their selected strategic position for their MVP to the needs of that customer profile, leaving the salesperson to compete in a disadvantaged position.?

The salesperson might still win the sale…perhaps by lowering price, through persuasive charm, or highlighting an alternative strength to win the day. However, the customer is left with a mismatch of the best fit in a competitive market, at least on some of the product features. Now customer delivery, service and support, etc. have a customer whose needs are not fully met.

Complaints to field staff, customer satisfaction survey results, updated voice of customer sessions, and other feedback loops highlight this problem upstream into the Product Management. Product Management may respond by writing new requirements, or possibly suggest that the original spirit of the initial requirement was not met, as the customers are dissatisfied.

Unfortunately, R&D, like most things in business, are governed by the Law of Scarcity, cannot deliver every requirement. Suddenly, the customer becomes lost in the politics of delivering a work package.?

How can this be avoided??

Wholistic research is one key, communication is another.?

Customer research can be absolutely invaluable; however it needs to gather the holistic perspective. Upfront Voice of Customer for example should also grab qualitative, non-functional attributes of a market. This can avoid issues later when R&D have questions unique to the market not specified in the requirements, or when the product is launched and details on the target segment are lost along the way, causing sales and marketing to target the wrong customers.

Internal communication about the target market is another critical step. Frequently, when a product is explained internally it is described in terms of what it does; features, functionality, etc. to match requirements or as a comparison to a competitor’s features/functionality. Rarely is it explained who it is for, i.e. the detailed segment it is targeting, let alone the personas of the roles within the customer that buy, approve, use, etc. the product or service.?

Let’s take a two examples to highlight the point of basic segmentation:?

• Example 1; a manufacturing company. Are they light or heavy manufacturing? Are they continuous or discrete manufacturing? Are they component or assemble or fully integrated? Are they union or non-union? Are they automated or manual? Do they operate in a high cost or low cost labor market? The answers to those can lead to quite different customer profiles and needs.
• Example 2; a mining operation. Are they open pit or underground? Let’s say underground -? what is their mining method; room and pillar, block caving, modified block caving, cut and fill, open stope? What are they mining -? is it a high or low value commodity? What size operation is it? These attributes, for those who’ve experienced them first-hand, lead to significantly different ways of operating, different needs, and different ways of solving problems. GNSS as an illustration, doesn’t work well underground.

Even in those two small examples, the narrative around the segmentation matters, and it matters to everyone in the company in order to be customer centric. For example, an accounts receivable clerk might be more understanding with a customer who has periodic payments from their customer such as a discrete manufacturer. No point in turning on the pressuring payment from a customer waiting for their own payments.?

Additionally, a salesperson will be more effective if they are aimed at the right target customer for their product, making service and support easier. Likewise, when adding new requirements, elaborating those in terms of the new customer segments, alongside the new requirements, will better engage the developers? in the journey - a new problem to solve that grows the business. It will also help them think more holistically about the solution, creating functionality that takes into consideration those non-functional requirements.

Lastly, first hand customer exposure, on their site, can be illuminating.

I’m not saying every role requires direct daily customer contact - where feasible it should be organized - but that can be time consuming and prevent other work from being done. However, appropriate levels of customer interaction, like inviting a pool of representative customers to sit on a panel and explain their needs, perspectives, and answer questions, can be extremely valuable across a company. It allows everyone a chance to learn from direct interaction instead of filtering through channels of verbal and written communication, like the old “pass the message” or “telephone game”, hoping the message stays intact to the end.

Obviously, like any short article, the whole answer isn’t here, but I hope it provides some applicable insights. A customer-centric organization is not only more profitable with higher customer satisfaction and retention, it is more enjoyable for the employees, improving their understanding of how their role fits into the organisation’s customer support goals.