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Current economic conditions are perfect for forcing us to win greater profitability from engineering a revolution in how we see customers. It’s time for a revolution in business. We need to start thinking in a completely new way about our customers.

It’s now a full century since César Ritz was famously quoted as saying le client n’a jamais tort, which means ‘the customer is never wrong’ rather than ‘the customer is always right’. In 1908, when Ritz said this, economic conditions were very different from how they are now. Unemployment benefit didn’t exist; if you failed to win customers you were at serious risk of starving. Many of us will lament current credit-crunch economic conditions, but this is all a holiday compared with life in 1908.

And perhaps, if we are really going to devote ourselves to making our organisations better at winning, looking after and retaining customers, maybe we should – at least at one level – actually be grateful that times are pretty tough right now. Tough times can force us to look harder at ourselves, at what we are doing and what we are thinking. Tough times can bring a new focus, a new clarification, as we will be figuratively hungrier and maybe, just maybe, keener to learn. Being under pressure to help our organisations perform to their very peak during difficult conditions may be the very time when we might be really open to new business strategies, and even desperate for them...

Besides, we should welcome a revolution in how we see customers. This organisational strategy is, by definition (because businesses are in business to make maximum profit from meeting customers’ needs), the one that must matter the most. 

What, in essence, is the revolution all about?

The revolution is in how we see customers and how we structure and run our organisations for their benefit. We need to orientate our businesses around customers and their needs in a completely new way. We need to put customers back at the very centre of why we are in business. We may be shooting more and more arrows, but too many of them are missing the bullseye, or even not hitting the target. We need to generate a tornado within our organisations, a furious wind that blows away the cobwebby, lacklustre habit of paying mere lip-service to the idea that our customers are why we are in business. We need to carry at the forefront of our minds that this is why we are in business.

‘Is Rome worth one good man’s life?’ Maximus’s former lover Princess Lucilla asks the senators in the thrilling final scene of the movie Gladiator. ‘We believed it once,’ Lucilla adds. ‘Make us believe it again.’ Leaving Ancient Rome and focusing on you, do you regard taking every step to make your organisation completely focused around its customers something that is worth your devotion, ingenuity and energy? Yes, most likely you did believe that once, but sometimes the internally-focused preoccupations of an organisation get in the way. Well, it’s time to believe it again, and time to make your colleagues believe it again, too.

Your organisation, in short, needs to become truly customer-centric.

Being customer-centric – pursuing the vitally important goal of Customer Centricity – is much more, indeed infinitely more, than just knowing how important your customers should be to you. Everyone knows this, or should do, but let’s face it – just knowing something doesn’t mean we’ll base our actions around that knowledge. Unfortunately, in many cases, perhaps even in most cases, the larger an organisation grows the worse it becomes at devoting itself to customers.

Research that Charteris has carried out suggests that in many large organisations, only about twenty percent of activity is devoted to customers’ interests. The other eighty percent? Well, it consists of stuff that isn’t, stuff that’s about the organisation’s agenda – often simply internal stuff – rather than what’s focused around the customer. There you go: there’s the gap between what people know and what they actually do. After all, it’s not as if these people who go to work and devote themselves purely to the organisational agenda think ‘customers aren’t important’, but all the same, some passion for the customer has slipped away, some customer focus that should be as taut as a tight bowstring has become slack and loose, some disease of indifference to customers has contaminated the organisation.

So it’s time for a revolution in how we see customers, and that really does apply to all of us. The American writer and Nobel laureate William Faulkner once observed that no writing is ever as good as it can be, and that’s also true of organisations and the focus they have on customers. They can always do better.

The world of business today requires organisations to have a flexibility and broad market knowledge that tends to require organisations to be led by inspired teamwork. Customer Centricity is arguably more difficult to achieve than it’s ever been. Globalisation and the proliferation of cross-sector as well as cross-border competition, place bigger burdens on organisations than has ever been the case before.

As a response to this, large organisations tend to be run more and more by intellectuals with MBAs. Even what MBA actually stands for says it all, really. Master of Business Administration, not Master of Winning and Retaining Customers. Business is not a kind of sophisticated game of chess; it’s more like running a market stall, and that’s true in a vital sense even if the organisation employs thousands, or tens of thousands, of people. Not only have market conditions grown more demanding, so have customers. In a sense, they know too much. They know they can change from your website to one of your competitor’s at the click of a mouse. They know, for example, the world is nowadays a 24/7 one, so why (they think) shouldn’t they enjoy a 24/7 service in everything? ‘If I can do 24-hour banking why can’t I talk to my local council at any time, too?’

And yes, by the way, it isn’t only large profit-making organisations that are massively affected by the vital need to become customer-centric: public sector bodies are too. The truth is that we all are. The customer- centric mindset deserves not only to be applied to business life; it belongs in every aspect of our lives. After all, doesn’t being interested in, and focused around the agenda of people with whom you want to forge any kind of relationship make good sense?

So how exactly do you become customer-centric? Well, a great starting-point is to work out who your customers actually are, and in business that’s by no means always easy. The difficulty of achieving it explains why, for example, many organisations – both in the private and public sector – are still so bad at furnishing themselves with a single view of customers, or why most organisations tend to have structures that are silo- ased and essentially designed around the needs of the organisation rather than the customer.

When you’ve worked out who your customers are, and recovered from the shocks you will almost inevitably encounter when you do this, (a well known department store chain, for example, recently discovered to its surprise that about fifteen percent of its customers lived in council housing), the next thing to do is to get aligned to your customers. This alignment is the core of the whole thing. It requires a real and profound wish on your part to make your organisation truly focused around its customers.

It is a tough process; you may need external help from specialists who are less close to your organisation (and hence less emotionally involved with it) than you are. You need to be honest with yourself, and willing to change radically. This is no time for adhering to false assumptions or outdated mantras about what your organisation should look like or how it should be run.

You may find, and many organisations do, that the ‘efficiencies’ they have put in place are – when a close spotlight is put on them – actually designed to benefit your organisation rather than your customers. If so, it’s unlikely you’ll be able to achieve the changes you need to achieve unless you rethink and even dismantle these efficiencies.

Be thorough. Really mean business. Remember: every day, every hour, every minute that you are not customer-centric you are bleeding away profitability that could be yours. Do you really want to keep on doing that?

This article appeared in Expatriate Advisor in Winter 2008/2009.

Please read more about our work in Customer Centricity.

This article discusses the costs and benefits you can expect at each level

1. INTRODUCTION

Application Integration is the biggest cost driver of corporate IT. While it has been popular to

emphasise the business process integration aspects of EAI, it remains true that data integration is a

huge part of the problem, responsible for much of the cost of EAI. You cannot begin to do process

integration without some data integration.

Data integration is an N-squared problem. If you have N different systems or sources of data to

integrate, you may need to build as many as N(N -1) different data exchange interfaces between them –

near enough to N2. For large companies, where N may run into the hundreds, and N2 may be more

than 100,000, this looks an impossible problem.

In practice, the figures are not quite that huge. In our experience, a typical system may interface to

between 5 and 30 other systems – so the total number of interfaces is between 5N and 30N. Even this

makes a prohibitive number of data interfaces to build and maintain. Many IT managers quietly admit

that they just cannot maintain the necessary number of data interfaces, because the cost would be

prohibitive. Then business users are forced to live with un-integrated, inconsistent data and fragmented

processes, at great cost to the business.

The bad news is that N just got bigger. New commercial imperatives, the rise of e-commerce, XML

and web services require companies of all sizes to integrate data and processes with their business

partners’ data and processes. If you make an unsolved problem bigger, it generally remains unsolved.

Users and software vendors have devoted huge efforts to tackling the N2 data integration problem.

The solutions available today can be grouped into four main levels of increasing sophistication and

power:

1. Hand coding of data interfaces

2. Source-to-target mapping and translation tools

3. Integration hubs and brokers

4. Full model-based integration

This article discusses the costs and benefits you can expect at each level.