Sustainability changes customer centricity goals

Hello! I am Ben Reason, Livework's founder taking my turn at the newsletter this week.

I would like to discuss two themes that Livework is passionate about -? customer centricity and sustainability - how they can feel worlds apart and how they can come together.

At Livework we publish and work on both topics. Sometimes I wonder how it looks to the outside world… Do we look confused or is the connection clear??

Partly this is working in the open - we are all navigating the shift from ‘business as usual’ to a world where ‘every job is a climate job’ - so it is the nature of our times to have a foot in both.

However, I think there is more to it, that customer centricity is a key quality to navigating this shift - but also that customer centricity takes on a new meaning.

What are the needs of customers? ?

Classical customer centricity holds that the customer is king. This is rarely the truth but it is a truism that is held by customer centricity folks. I asked Liveworkers for a definition and the answer was:?

Now sustainability, and I really mean environmental sustainability, is defined along these lines:

This is the point where the two feel ‘worlds apart’. And this is because whilst the planet is missing from the first statement people are missing from the second.

What if we create a blended statement:

Does this bring them back together? I don’t know, but it does show that how we meet human needs is a critical concern. As businesses exist - in the logic of customer centricity - to meet customers’ needs, then I think customer centricity is going to be a key part of how businesses approach sustainability.?

What I am sure about is that businesses need to better understand these new ‘customers’, the ones whose needs are inextricably linked to the ecological balance of the planet.

How we do this is something that we are exploring and you can read more about it here, in the first part of our "How to act on Sustainability" thinking.

Question of the week:

I hope it is clear that for me and Livework this is a work in progress - we are very open to feedback and I would love to hear from you if you are interested in furthering the discussion. Let's have a chat!

Please ping me here on Linkedin and we can take it from there.

Ben

Next week...

We’ll dive into the topic of?“Transforming Through Service Orientation”?based on the?webinar we had two weeks ago. Thank you to everyone that attended!

We’ll be sharing some of the key thoughts and solutions around how as a strategic decision-maker you can overcome organisational challenges by using service orientation tools. Looking forward to having you next week!

What's going on at Livework Studio?

• Sustainability in the Service Design practice: After months of developing our thinking around sustainability, we are finally sharing (little by little) where we see a clear sustainability-related "action gap" in the Service Design space. Check out our first piece of thinking here and stay tuned for more!
• How customer centric is your organisation? Yes, we know, it is complex, it is confusing, and it can be messy. But, what if we told you we figured out a way to simplify its complexity? We are using it with our own clients too. If you are curious to know what your organisation's current customer centric status is, take the assessment yourself by clicking here. It will take you around 10 min to complete. We always want to keep improving, so let us know if you have feedback!

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About Livework

Good services don’t happen by accident. They need to be designed. That’s what we do.

Livework?was the first service design consultancy. Over the last 21 years, we have used design to solve business challenges on more than?1500?projects and programmes.

We’ve been around the block when it comes to navigating and delivering change. In addition to improving and innovating in customer experience, we help organisations transition to becoming the customer-centric and sustainable organisations they aspire to be. Find out more on?www.liveworkstudio.com?or drop us a line at [email protected].