Customer Closeness For The C-Suite
How do you stay close to your customers when you're high up the corporate ladder?
Who Knows Your Customers Best?
The people who know your customers the best are the people who talk to them the most often. If you're in retail people who work at the checkout, people who stock the shelves, your support team etc. They know your customers. They know the common questions. The know the common complaints. As someone who is higher up in the organisation, you are most often relying on some sort of report about these things at an aggregate level in order understand them and to make decisions. But you're not having that face interaction with customers on a day-to-day basis. And so there's always a little bit of a gap in your knowledge. So what do a lot of companies do to try and solve this?
Sporadic Visits To The Front Line
What happens is that senior level team go to the shop sporadically once a year maybe twice a year and they work on a till. And they hope that this will solve the problem, but it won't, for a couple of reasons.
The first is that often these trips are not about getting close to customers. They're about Optics. About showing "Hey, I'm one of you, I worked on a till for four hours. I know your life I can communicate with you. I'm one of the team."
The second is that they don't happen often enough. They're very sporadic maybe once or twice a year and so what happens is that someone in the C-Suite will speak to a customer or have a particular interaction, and it becomes like a case study for the next half a year. "This isn't a problem, I spoke to Tim about it."
The third thing is that if the head of your company is coming down to your retail store, you're quite likely to have done extra cleaning, to put your best staff on that particular day, and maybe to even arrange things. I think the CEO of L'Oreal would famously arrange store visits in each market, but the route was planned in meticulous detail beforehand, outdoor ads would be procured along the route, the retailers would be briefed months ahead and told to reduce the facings of competitor products.?So it was a comforting version of the truth, but not necessarily the truth. And I think that's probably true for a lot of companies and a lot of CEOs when they visit the stores, that it's not really reflecting and reality and so they're always getting a little bit of a show.
The Disassociation Of Wealth
Another problem is that the higher up you are, the more money earning and so naturally you start to lack understanding around the problems of what will most likely be your core customers. People are empirical in their thinking. They believe what they see. So if you are high up in a company, probably most of your friends are too, and so when things happen like the cost of living crisis, the affect to your wallet is less. And so you think this is not a problem. "I can see that milk has gone up by 30p, but that's not a problem for me and so it's not a problem for others."
Even within a company, if you work for an airline, you're flying luxury because it's free. It's one of the perks of the job. And so you're not having the experience of flying economy, which is what the bulk of your customer base do. And so you instantly lose touch you become in a little bubble.
Short-Termism
The modern world is always in flux. In this environment it is no wonder that businesses are focusing on today’s wins. Building sustainable business processes and identifying best practice all seem like costly pursuits in a world where everything keeps shifting. Yet, without a long-term commitment to frame (and keep reframing) your brand around the customer, it simply won’t happen.
Framing your business around the customer is quite often NOT done today. We just say "what's the feedback and we'll try and improve" but too often we need to do more than that. We need to change our services. We need to change our pricing. Maybe we need to change the way that work is delivered to some degree.
And whilst companies say "We're very customer-centric business" when you get down to it if customers are saying that "this is too expensive to them right now" they still don't knock off 20%. Instead they would try and attract more customers that can afford them and hope they stick the landing.
Banks are the perfect example of this. Customers must surely have been saying for decades that when they open at 9:15am and then close at 4:00pm, it makes it difficult to access banking if you have a job. But did the banks change? No! That was the way they had always worked and so new, challenger brands who thought first of what was good for customers were able to come in a disrupt that whole industry.
The Wrong Boss
Who do you work for? Seems like a simple question doesn’t it. You’d probably say that you work for a company, not the customer. It’s customers who ultimately pay everyone’s salary but they are distant and indistinct group when compared to Jerry from payroll who you see every day. With this in mind, it’s not surprising that processes and procedures are put in place that benefit the company rather than the customer. I think it's a really good idea to have some level of customer interaction a decision level have a seat that represents the customer in all of your decision making. I think Amazon famously has an empty and that's supposed to represent the customer or something along those lines. But instead of an empty seat fill that seat with actual customers!
Getting Lost In Processes
Now, I love a flow chart as much as anyone. Yes, processes and systems are critical to the overall success of your business, but it’s very easy to get lost in functional thinking. No matter how much data you put into them, most processes live on paper, are open to interpretation, and don’t help you serve the customer when they are right there in front of you. If you want to create more value around your customers, you need to rip up the old ways of thinking, go beyond one-off training sessions and look above and beyond functional lines.
Process is a really difficult to map how and it's so easy to get lost in the detail, and consider every possible outcome and by the time you've mapped that all out, probably the world and your business has moved on. Think about the themes that often come up. What are the aggregate levels of that?
Lack Of Centralised Data
And last but not least is just a data problem. So not having your data in one place and when it comes to customer feedback. What I see in a lot of organisations is they have some sort of customer support system. (It could be something like Zendesk) That information sits in this Silo and it doesn't sit with the CRM data.
And the reason is that there's a lot of different information associated with customer support that maybe isn't super useful for sales teams and marketing teams that need to deal with customers. And so those teams are sitting in silos and they need to be brought together in a way that makes sense.
A really common scenario I see is that marketing are trying to upsell a customer something and they don't realise that this customer recently had a support issue and so they're actually more likely to churn and not the time to sell them something! Instead of importing a full support log, you could just create flag back to your CRM that says hey this person contacted support so churn risk is increased by 10% or something.
The other big data source is external data sitting on review sites. This often doesn't get matched because its anonymous, or not a 100% link, but is well worth the effort if you can as it gives you a more complete picture.
Thought Of The Week:
C-Suite leaders need to be mindful or the fact that are not in tune with your customers and their day-to-day life. Make sure you are hearing enough of their stories, enough of the time. Don't just rely and market research or data, but make sure that that research and data is all sitting nicely in one place.