Building a customer-oriented business means going beyond the specific business units that have contact with customers. A customer-oriented business is customer-oriented in the back-end as well as the front-end.
But it’s also not enough to declare slogans – “put the customer in the centre of everything we do” – we must invest in specific business capabilities that keep the organisation aligned to the values of our current and future customers.
These 5 principles must be in place across your organisation – and in each case the business unit(s) responsible for promoting and implementing these principles must be identified.
1. Systematic Listening to Customers
Surveys are frustrating to your customers. Not only that but they only provide insight after a customer has already had a bad experience. The rest the time they are just reassuring you that the bulk of your customers of course have a positive (or at last not negative) experience.
You need to establish systematic listening platforms that ensure that every customer interaction leaves at foot-print in your customer data system that can be used to proactively measure how you customers are experiencing both your service channels and your products.
Tight integration between your digital channel systems, your partner systems, and your customer data system means your organisation to listen to customers systematically and push those insights into service points, performance management processes, and even businesses cases for new initiatives.
2. Measuring from the Customer’s Perspective
Traditional balanced scorecards attempt to add a customer perspective to your internal, financial, and innovation performance measures. While addressing an important gap in measurement this left the customer perspective as a seperate and distinct dimension competing with other measures.
How you measure your performance should be unique to your operating model, not based on a selection generic or vanity metrics that only measure what you know you are investing to improve. If you have a unique set of performance measure that make specific sense to your business model you are then measuring to differentiate rather than measuring to compare.
For the customer measures this means evaluating all internal, financial, and innovation measures from the customer’s perspective – not just adding new customer-specific measures. We recommend establishing a “customer-return on operations” metric that uses a secret formula, specific to your business, that aggregates these relationships into a single number.
3. Personalisation by Default
Popular agile delivery approaches focus on maximising the ability to change as requirements change. This approach has improved IT / Business alignment and created significant improvements in throughput and cost control.
But the most important feedback loop isn’t between your IT department and your other business units, it’s between your business capabilities and your customers. Focusing on agility at the expense of adaptable products and services means that continuous delivery is the only solution to an evolving understand of customer needs.
Design all processes, systems, and products with the assumption that they will be personalised and must adapt as they are used. This approach extends the techniques your technical teams call “agile” and “DEVOPS” beyond Business / IT alignment to Business / Customer alignment.
4. Double-sided Digital Teams and Channels
First generation “Digital” teams focused on the digital channel. These teams established new digital capabilities that mirrored customer-centric online start-ups. This approach left digitisation of back-end systems and processes to other teams.
Organisations with mature digital channels know that it’s back-end systems and legacy processes that now have the greatest impact on customer engagement. As organisations re-integrate their digital teams into their core operations they can address these legacy challenges and improve both customer and employee engagement.
Double-sided digital teams have customer journeys on one side and employee journey on the other. Digitalisation initiatives then become an orchestration between these two sets of journeys; enabled by data, analytics, and digital backbones connecting both business processes and IT systems.
5. Continuous Delivery Mark II
Organisations that take their agile initiative from the IT department to the enterprise level make a significant change in the approach. Where agility from an IT perspective means maximising throughput and leaving the prioritisation of value to others, an enterprise level approach must address value discovery.
The types of coaches and delivery partners you needed to establish IT-driven agility will be different to the types of coaches you need for Continuous Delivery Mark II. Bottlenecks will no longer be technical, or resource-based. Bottlenecks will be in systems design and in the evaluation of experiments.
“Fail fast” techniques need to be shifted to “fail local” and for some markets and customer segments “don’t fail at all”. This integration of business risk into customer-facing innovation will be the ultimate intersection between human and machine intelligence for modern corporations.