Charteris

(Excerpt taken from Stephen Hewett’s paper “The right way to do the right thing for the customer”)

Here’s our 8 step plan for maximising Customer Centricity within your organisation:

1. Identify who your primary and secondary customers are.
2. Identify the products and services they consume and through which channels (web, call centre, bricks and mortar and so on).
3. Work out where the crucial ‘points of addition’ occur in adding value to those products and services.
4. Make sure that the business areas involved in these points of addition understand how they each add value to these products and services.
5. Align the organisational structure to support these points of addition.
6. Minimise the activities that don’t add value to what the customer is getting from the organisation.
7. Ensure that the correct measurements maintain and improve the processes.
8. Support where appropriate with technology solutions.

——————————–

(Download the full whitepaper “The right way to do the right thing for the customer”)

If you want to know more, do feel free to get in touch as we have developed some helpful frameworks for the end to end delivery of customer centricity.

(Excerpt taken from Stephen Hewett’s paper “The right way to do the right thing for the customer”)

Successful organisations, whether in the private or public sector, all have one thing in common. They have all found a way, or ways, of consistently winning from customers a level of loyalty and willingness to buy again that in effect amounts to a reliable mandate from customers who are attracted to what the business has to offer.

The business, of course, will want those customers to keep being attracted by what is on offer, and for the number of customers who are attracted to increase. Essentially, Customer Centricity is a way of disciplining – in the most positive sense – the entire organisation to ensure that it is as good at looking after its customers and winning and maintaining new customer mandates and new levels of loyalty from customers as it possibly can be.

So what does it really mean in practice? How do you actually ‘do’ Customer Centricity at your organisation?

The key is to achieve agility in how the organisation is run and how every element in the chain links together. Make sure everyone knows who their own key internal and external customers are, and what products and services each of them needs (and are prepared to pay for, in the case of external customers). Take steps to assess whether your customer chain is delivering products and services most effectively at the lowest cost.

Be ready to start making your organisation customer centric from first principles – possibly taking advice on how best to do this – and be adamant that you won’t paper over the cracks in those parts of your organisation that aren’t agile and flexible enough to demonstrate very clearly the role they play in the chain.

Above all, be honest. Prepare yourself for long-term incremental change. Build a group of stakeholders from all levels who understand the concept of Customer Centricity, what it requires and who can preach it to others.

Ultimately you will need to drive the Customer Centricity concept and principles throughout all aspects of the business including strategic vision, people, process, organisational structure, information and technology.

Yes, change is hard, but you can grow Customer Centricity within your organisation on a department by department basis: you don’t need to do it all at once. And when you are ready to implement the technology, you’ll find there is plenty of great technology out there – systems for Workflow management, Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP), databases management, Business Intelligence tools and so on – that will enable you to create your new-look organisation without delay.

Remember that deep down in your organisation the chain that will delight your customers – and your shareholders – very possibly already exists, obscured by internally focused organisation design, poor process, inappropriately deployed technology and lack of vision.

Liberate it, and enjoy the brightest tomorrow you can imagine.

——————————–

(Download the full whitepaper “The right way to do the right thing for the customer”)

(Excerpt taken from Stephen Hewett’s paper “The right way to do the right thing for the customer”)

In short because they

1. Lose focus,
2. Lose stamina,
3. Get complacent and
4. Get lazy.

When organisations first start trading they usually (and certainly should) have a clear idea what they are in business to do, who does what, and why. Every person involved in a start-up will most likely know how they add value to the finished product or service and whom they need to work with internally to make sure the best service or product is delivered to their new customers. They will know this because looking after the customer is so completely why they set up the business in the first place.

But then, if the new business succeeds, it will grow. To start with, as it grows, the founders and the new staff may be able to keep alive the flame that embodies the spirit of why they are in business. But sooner or later, somewhere along the line, the flame will diminish or even go out completely, as the clarity of why you are in business fades. Once that clarity starts to fade, Customer Centricity fades with it.

Why does this happen?

To speak generally, one has to say that as organisations grow in size a curious effect almost invariably occurs. Staff members start to look inward, worry about their own internal departmental issues and become more and more remote from the actual agenda of the customer.

Internal management processes arise that have little or nothing at all to do with adding value to the external customer. It’s common for whole new business areas and departments to be created to deal with and manage these internal issues. .

The trouble is, too many large organisations forget that people don’t just work for money, but satisfaction too; and they don’t ensure that their staff are encouraged and empowered to look after customers properly. This is particularly so for staff working in internal departments that don’t have a direct interface to customers, though it often applies to customer-facing departments, too. When people in those internal departments perceive that the organisation doesn’t empower them to take steps to understand their role in looking after customers, they forget they are part of a ‘chain’ of organisational resources aligned to allow the organisation to do its very best for its customers and consequently start to drift and lose focus at a motivational level.

In practice, within a large organisation it is almost inevitable that most of its departments will not be customer-facing. And here the very size of a large organisation can conspire against it being successful. The organisation needs to be certain, at all times, of what every individual person and every department is doing that adds value to the paying customer by providing top-quality products and services to customers directly or by doing things that directly facilitate the provision to customers.

After all, if any one individual or department is not involved in the chain, it needs to be asked what exactly they are doing in the organisation at all.

——————————–

(Download the full whitepaper “The right way to do the right thing for the customer”)