Who owns the customer? (some research)
Peter Armaly
Customer Success industry advisor | Principal at Valuize Consulting| Published author
- All the work of all of our organizations revolves around meeting the customer’s expectations of value.
- The success of customers is everyone’s job; it’s not the work of one organization.
- The customer’s experience inspires us to drive to greater heights and fuels innovations across all teams.
- Our people are aligned around one central purpose, the customer.
We often hear and see this form of catechism in the world of cloud-based businesses. CEOs making these statements really believe in the core message, that the customer is the reason the company exists.
How can you argue against that thinking? Why would you? And how can you argue against any of those statements? They’re visionary with a goal to generate the kind of excitement in employees that might boost their engagement and allow the company to harness the energy required to achieve large corporate objectives.
But do those kinds of statements cause more harm than good? Do they risk triggering and inflating internal competitive forces that can potentially erode the levels of coordination and collaboration that large corporate objectives depend on?
I’m co-authoring a book that will dive deeper into this topic. It will examine it from a variety of angles and offer clear ideas and recommendations for how to inject practical substance into the lofty language of mission statements like those at the top.
Our research comprises interviews, research from 3rd-party firms, and knowledge from our collective decades of experiences in leadership roles. One other thing we’ve done is conduct a survey that some of you have already participated in. We are very grateful to you for that. The survey is still open. For those of you reading this who haven’t completed it, you can help by following this link.
And while it’s still early days in how we are interpreting the survey data, some interesting findings are showing up. This graph, for example.
When you look at how people are responding to this particular question about which organization owns the customer, does that graph give you confidence that those beautiful vision statements at the beginning of this article are helping?
Customer Success Leader | Management Consultant | Marketing, Branding, and CX Innovator | Delivering Measurable Results
3 年This is an interesting take on this question, Peter! I am looking forward to seeing your research and reading the book ??
Vice President Managed Services | Customer Success, Value Selling
3 年A tricky question to answer. But if the organization is customer-centric, all the organizations would have their share of ownership, but in a way, the process owns the customer. Having a single owner on the old fashion way has a lot of downsides. One of them is competition internally and the trap to forget about the most critical piece, deliver value, and outcomes to the customer.
Customer-Led Growth champion. Coach, author, thinker with a passion for customer-led growth in B2B SaaS. On a mission to help every B2B SaaS turn measurable results for customers into profitable revenue.
3 年I have previously commented on this question with the view that it is the wrong question companies should be asking. I believe that we will achieve more by focusing on collaboration than ownership. As you say, the act of asking about ownership breeds internal competition; so don’t ask it.
Senior Cloud Solutions Architect - Manager | AWS, Azure, GCP
3 年Thanks for sharing this Peter, Great points. I'd like to share my two cents here. Customer Success is a company wide strategy and no unique function owns it as stated in the article. After all, Organization exists only because of customers and not vice versa. So, creating a unified experience for customers should flow from top to the bottom of the pyramid and try to create a Lifetime value to the customers.
Co-founder of the Experience Alliance, President of Dasteel Consulting, Board Advisor to Steelhead Technologies, Mcorp, Fidere.AI, & CMSWire, Stage 2 Capital Limited Partner, and former Oracle Chief Customer Officer
3 年Great points, Peter.