How to drive Customer Centricity through the back office

There are numerous frameworks and tools available for creating good customer centric strategies, from 360° surveys, Customer Centric analyses, journey maps and target state maps, to name a few. However, the one thing that many organisations struggle to do in their customer centric change management programs is… to change – that is, to actually execute and embed the very strategy and target state that they desire to see.

Here’s how it often plays out. The Senior Leadership Team or Board of Directors roll out a new strategy to improve customer centricity, with the best intentions and complete commitment. There may even be a surface level of investment to “jeuje up” the initiative, such as the strategic deployment of coffee mugs with slogans, water bottles (a corporate favourite), notebooks, Yammer posts and T-Shirts. There will probably be workshops and even a free lunch.

But what often happens is that when the strategy arrives at the desk of Sharon in Accounts, it stalls. While Sharon is a productive and engaged employee, who wants to buy in, she has no idea what this new customer centric strategy means at her level, nor who the customer is or her impact, if any, on the customer. The strategy is literally ‘lost in translation’.

And so, the strategy dies here.

In order for Sharon in Accounts, or even Mike the Middle Manager, to gain a clear understanding of how to implement the Customer Centric strategy from a back office or supporting role, several steps must be taken.

Firstly, support functions need to be educated on the central importance the customer has to the organisation as a whole and to be introduced to the concepts of Customer Centricity (CC) or Customer Experience (CX). They need to gain an understanding of how their individual role as a “CX Enabler” touches the customer, and understand the linkages between their team’s actions and the customer experience.

They also need to understand what their internal customers require (including prioritisation) and why they require these things. From here, a set of CX principles needs to be developed.

Other tools that could be employed at this point would be:

• Short videos that highlight different interactions and the difference between average and exceptional customer experience deliver
• Workshops to work through the CX principles and determine how they will give them meaning, how they will apply them in their area, and, how they will measure their own performance against these principles

Secondly, teams need to be categorised in to one of three groups: frontline teams that directly touch the external customer (CX Creators), teams that directly support the frontline teams (CX Enablers), and teams that don’t touch the customer or the frontline team – pure ‘back office’ teams (also CX Enablers).

Thirdly, the degree of impact that the new ‘whole of office’ approach to CX is having on the customer experience must be measured using appropriate measures.

Specific metrics must be created for each of the three teams mentioned above:

• Customer – whole of business, relevant segment, specific interaction
• Internal customer (specific) – via anonymous peer-based survey
• Operational Effectiveness – this must be carefully balanced with the other metrics, as operational effectiveness measures can actually look good when customer experience is actually poor

Finally, it is important to periodically review the proposed metrics and validate them in terms of value creation. For example, it may be useful to evaluate the impact that teams displaying high levels of customer centricity have on profitability.

Enacting the above measures will certainly have a marked effect on Sharon in Accounts and Mike the Middle Manager.

Campbell Packer is a Senior Consultant with Strativity Group, the world’s leading customer experience and change firm. He has worked with some of Australia’s most recognised organisations and helps them deliver exceptional customer experiences through their people.