What is your distance-to-the-customer?
According to James Paine at MIT’s System Dynamics Group: every person makes the best decision they can depending on the system they are a part of (1).
I fully agree with this statement and use it a lot to make sense of why we make the decisions we do. But I want to add another layer to it:
“Every person makes the best decision they can depending on the information closest to them”.
This is partly from Matt LeMay’s book Agile for Everybody (2), which is one of the best books I’ve read connecting the customer to agile, where he makes the argument that in an organization the distance-to-the-customer is often much further compared to the distance to their own products. Meaning that when they make decisions the most influential information will be their own product information long before the customer insight has any influence.
Being product centric is therefore only natural because of the product's closeness to the decision maker. And this is where the opportunity is: bringing the customer closer.
Closing the distance-to-the-customer means making customer insights and data at scale, in real time and continuous.
The job is to reduce the distance-to-the-customer in our organizations, to either make sure every colleague has direct interactions with customers on a regular basis (which is the best option) or that the customer insights is as close to everyone as the product information, or even closer.
With product information close and now channel information increasingly closer, what are the tools we can use to bring the customer as near and as frequently into interactions with everyone in the organization as our product or channel information?
The customer insights needs to be unlocked from its current slow, unscalable, costly and in-frequent formats and be brought to the organization a.) at scale, in real-time, continuously, and b.) through the lens of new questions the organizations needs to ask serving the decisions it needs to make (data serves decisions, not the other way around).
Keep your products close, but your customers closer.
Sources:
(1). James Paine, System Dynamics: Systems Thinking and Modeling for a Complex World, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o-Yp8A7BPE8
(2). Matt LeMay, Agile for everybody, https://www.oreilly.com/library/view/agile-for-everybody/9781492033509/
Fundador / Economista / Artesano del márketing / Viajero / Estudiante perpetuo / Escritor de canciones / Padre
2 个月Big-data and automatisation of customer-related-processes seems to have been the song to sing in the recent years, but the real profit is going to be in the personalization of goods and services and the communication with the customer, hence getting rid of as many third parties as possible between the company and the customer sounds like a must. Adding to what Graham Hill says and what Javier G. Recuenco also says in his book 'Personalization', you should not bother the customer and just contact him/her when the contact is worth his/fer time and attention...you need to build a relationship with the customer, not squeeze him. Good post, by the way.
Co-Founder at Omneo, a platform for omnichannel retail Clienteling, CX and Loyalty
2 个月This image made my day. The opportunity is so clear when you see it like this
30 Years Marketing | 25 Years Customer Experience | 20 Years Decisioning | Opinions my own
2 个月Another thoughtful post Helge Tenn?. One I agree with except for one statement, that 'make sure every colleague has direct interactions with customers on a regular basis'. Whilst that might be great for the company, it is not for the customer. All they want is to get their job done, quickly, easily and with minimum fuss. They don't care about your brand and they don't want to talk to anyone (unless something goes wrong). The last thing they need is people contacting them who can't help them. This falls foul of all three Rs of personalisation. It doesn't Respect them, it doesn't Reinforce the value they get from the products they have already bought and it doesn't Recommend anything better. Don't do it! TL;DR Customer don't care about you. They care about their jobs. Don't pester them unless you can help do their job faster, easier and better. Br, Graham