Customer insight therapy: A proven cure for the IT 'order taker' syndrome

The single most important factor governing the success of a commercial enterprise is its ability to attract, satisfy and retain paying customers.?Commercial firms succeed by prioritizing the activities of their internal functional teams in ways that directly address their customers’ needs, desires and expectations.

?IT organizations play a critical role in enabling a company’s internal operations and customer interactions.?IT’s initiatives and operations should also be governed by the buying behaviors of paying customers.?Unfortunately, IT groups rarely have direct contact with the individuals who are ultimately footing the bill for their services and determining the success or failure of their efforts.?

?The corporate grapevine game

?IT organizations receive demand signals from customers through functional departments that have direct customer interactions, such as product development, sales and marketing, retail operations, customer service, etc.?These signals are interpreted by individuals within these departments and transmitted to IT in the form of technical requirements for the construction, customization and maintenance of IT systems and services..

?In an ideal world, the fidelity of customer signals would remain high throughout this translation process.?However, in the real world demand signals are altered – sometimes intentionally, sometimes subconsciously – by the cultures of different functional organizations and the beliefs, experiences and ambitions of their members.?In practice, the signal to noise ratio of customer signals is frequently degraded by the time they’re presented to an IT organization.

?In many instances, the transmission of customer signals to IT groups closely resembles a game of grapevine (also known as ‘telephone’ or ‘Chinese whispers’ in different countries).?Participants in a grapevine game pass a secret through a chain of whispered retellings.?At the conclusion of the game, the last person in the chain publicly states what they have been told and the first person in the chain reiterates the original secret.?The wide disparity between the original and final versions of the secret is typically a source of great amusement for the game participants.?But it’s really not all that funny if it’s the primary process governing the customization of a company’s IT resources.

?Customer insight therapy

?The most obvious way IT groups can avoid being held hostage by the perceptions and opinions of their functional co-workers is direct interaction with paying customers.?IT groups hate being labeled as ‘order takers’ but in the absence of direct customer interaction that is their ultimate fate.?Direct interaction provides IT teams with the knowledge and credibility they need to push back on selected ‘requirements’ that emerge through the conventional grapevine process.?

?Examples of customer insight therapy abound:

·??????Gerri Martin-Flickinger spent two weeks performing every job within a Starbucks retail store before joining her IT team as Starbucks’ Chief Technology Officer in 2015.

·??????Ron Anderson-Lehman sent two members of his Continental Airlines IT team to Houston International Airport every Tuesday to observe the issues passengers experienced at the ticketing kiosks in the check-in areas.?Amazingly, they returned with specific improvement ideas every single week.

·??????I personally sat deskside with ?customer service agents every Friday afternoon during a multi-month support center renovation project.?I was stunned at the difficulty the agents experienced in accessing the most rudimentary information regarding a customer’s identity, past purchases, order status and recent complaints during many calls.

?Reactions to customer insight initiatives launched by IT teams may be unanticipated.?Functional representatives who have long considered themselves to be the sole source of truth in translating customer signals into IT requirements may be dismayed, offended or even enraged by such initiatives.?Frontline employees who deal with customers every day may be bewildered or even shocked that someone from IT wants to join or assist them in performing their daily activities.?

?Even if very little new substantive information is obtained through insight initiatives the mere fact that IT was willing to ‘walk a mile’ in the shoes of functional frontline workers will garner a degree of respect for the IT organization that it has never enjoyed before and enhance IT’s business credibility as well.?Most IT organizations could definitely benefit from some positive entries in their respect and credibility ledgers.

?A radical experiment or a new standard operating procedure?

?As we embark on 2023, what if you and your IT team established a monthly or quarterly target for the time you spend with frontline workers dealing directly with paying customers?

?You’ll likely discover that the sales lead qualification process or the retail store restocking process or the product return process that was so neatly diagrammed on your conference room whiteboard is far messier in the real world of frontline operations!?You may learn that some of the system enhancements that were presented to you as critical success factors in satisfying customer needs are rarely, if ever, used in practice.?

?In other circumstances you may find that frontline workers have never received proper training in customizations you implemented months ago.?And you will most assuredly discover that there are IT opportunities to reduce inefficiencies in the way work is currently being performed that have never been presented to you in the past.

?It’s not too late to make an organizational New Year’s Resolution for 2023.?You should seriously consider adding customer insight therapy to your current list of 2023 objectives and making direct customer interaction a standard operating procedure during the coming year.?If you’re in a leadership position, roll up your sleeves, go spend some time on the customer frontlines and send a message to your team that they’re not going to submissively take orders from others anymore!

Originally posted on Forbes.com CIO Network