11 Commandments for Customer Centered Change

By David Hicks, CEO of U.K. based Mulberry House Consulting

In keeping with the biblical theme of the 10 Commandments, I have listed below the key “thou should do…” activities that empirically have the highest leverage in terms of delivering a customer based strategy. There are 11 - you have received one bonus commandment. You will note they are equally internally and externally focused:

1. Stop investing money in customer based capabilities until you are sure these truly work: Build and encourage a mindset of piloting and testing small incremental improvements with customers and work to build the capability to continually look to pilot and test improvements to the customer proposition with customers.
2. Given the scale and scope of your business it’s highly likely that businesses have different levels of maturity. Systematically identify and encourage sharing of what’s already working well, this is likely to be both low risk and fast.
3. Build customer value creation into the strategy and planning process. Start off by ensuring the organizations business strategy is going to be delivered by the customer strategy and in turn that this is going to be supported by the data strategy.
4. Ensure you have a balance of customer based measures as key indicators to manage the business. Critically, these need to be given equal prominence as the usual efficiency metrics by managers (adding common, enterprise wide customer based measures is probably the single action that has highest leverage in driving a customer based agenda).
5. Ensure that the businesses product/service proposition is translated into terms that employees understand and can articulate back to customers and each. Make clear to staff the key practical things they can do to help reinforce the customer proposition. Celebrate and share stories where staff go “the extra mile” to reinforce these messages and put in place mechanisms to systematically draw up from the front line what customers are saying about your products and services.
6. Ensure that your people / HR team have translated the customer proposition and brand values into a customer centered staff hiring specification so that new hires are already aligned to the customer centered message. Starting to build a new customer centered culture with new hires will over time start to influence the longer serving staff. Your organization needs to handle unsuccessful applicants extremely well so as they become advocates of your business.
7. Encourage all executives to start listening to customers. Mandate that EVERY manager must make at least 4 customer visits each year (consider making this a condition of receiving the annual performance bonus). Each visit is to end with the question to the customer “what single thing do you think I can do personally to help improve my company” each executive is then to take personal responsibility for actioning these customer based suggestions
8. Encourage customers to help you listen better. Establish quarterly customer councils in each major market to ask them how your organization can improve the business for them in that market. Each time, reporting back on the progress of items raised at the last event.
9. Encourage your staff to systematically purchase yours and competitors’ products and services to gauge how well yours and competitor’s products and services compare and to inform where you need to improve and consolidate your offer, and to help educate staff on what they personally can do to improve the product/service
10. Comprehensively map the customer journey through your organization from the customer’s point of view. Then check this process for pain points with both staff and customers. Make managers specifically responsible for each stage in this process and for continuously improving it.
11. Systematically benchmark best customer practice in other sectors to help stretch the best performers in your organization and to keep it out in front of competitors in your sector.