Although much has been written about customer-centered companies and although many have tried to create them, even today few organizations have broken through to become truly customer-centered.
Often the underlying reason for a company’s inability to put the customer at its center is what appears to be a stand-off between its leaders and employees.
The key to ending this impasse is to determine what conditions need to exist for employees to embrace the customer-centered way of operating and to each or encourage corporate leaders to create those conditions.
More than Common Sense
In consulting sessions and company visits over many years, I have often been asked the same questions. Lower level managers, usually in a service function, ask ‘How can I get senior management to believe in delighting customers as much as I believe in it?’ With executives, the questions flips: ‘How can I get our people to pay attention to our customers?’ These questions mirror the frustration of many organizations trying reorient themselves around customers. Too often, neither leaders nor employees seem to be committed; worse, each side seems to be blaming the other. Managers must create four conditions to help employees feel a genuine passion for serving the customer; happily, there are three best practices that leaders can employ to create this most desired attitude.
“Successful organizations understand the importance of implementation, not just strategy, and, moreover, recognize the crucial role of their people in this process.”
——Jeffrey Pfeffer
Create Conditions for Change
The complexity, challenge, and time required for an organization to become truly customer-centric are usually underestimated. It is not just about introducing a new program, training customer contact people to smile over the phone, or conducting
a few customer focus groups. Rather, it is about changing the culture of the organization, a challenge that may seem as difficult as, say, rewriting your own DNA. Considering the case of British Airways, when in the 1980s, under the leadership of Sir Colin Marshall who delivered one of the most successful and dramatic transformation of an organization’s culture.
When arrived at the then-government-owned airline BOAC, it was losing money, abusing customers, and not doing well by its employees. Several years after Sir Colin privatized the company, it was cited as having the most improved service in the industry and as being the most profitable airline in the world. By any standard this remains one of the classic cultural turnarounds(similar turnaround also took place in 1990s when Lou Gerstner became the CEO of then-struggling IBM).
Study the BA and IBM success and other like them and patterns emerge of management actions that help to create conditions that assist each and every employee to commit to the new direction and engage in the personal change that is required to bring the customer into the equation at all levels of the organization. These actions are to
1.articulate and promote the new direction;
2.ensure each employee knows what is expected;
3.ensure each employee has the skill to do what is expected;
4.motivate each employee to do what is expected.
Looking at these four conditions, it is clear that they are based in common sense. But you would be amazed how difficult it is to implement them. Common sense, it has been said many times, is unfortunately not common at all.
Making it Happen
Articulate and promote the new direction
A study by Bain & Company asked CEOs to rate their level of confidence in their ability to perform various aspects of their job. Of those asked, 85% felt they handled strategy development well; strategy execution, conversely, dropped off dramatically to 40%. When asked about aligning their people with their company’s strategy, the response was 10%.
Create a clear vision and value statement to direct the organization This is not a new idea but many organizations have vision and value statements that seem to have little influence on day-to-day operations and decisions. They may sound good, but they are little more than windows dressing. It helps to have an audit to test the extent to which adopted vision and values are truly guiding the company.
Share the strategy of the organization with all employees Ironically, a company’s strategy is often deemed so confidential that it is not shared with employees, the people who have to make it happen. Sam Walton knew better, his policy was to share each Wal-Mart store’s vital performance information with all employees, even part-timers.
Actively promote the new direction When Lou Gerstner took over IMB, he committed first and foremost to continually selling the vision, repeating it with enthusiasm over and over again at every meeting with his employees. It simply is not enough to send an e-mail to all employees stating the new direction.
Ensure each employee knows what is expected
In a long research program that studied 400 organizations, 80,000 managers, and over one million employees, the Gallup Organization found that one of the factors that correlated highly with an organization’s success was employees knowing what is expected of them. Some key steps are required:
Use the chain of command to discuss and explain what is expected. When Michael Abrashoff, the commanding officer of the USS Benfold, took command of the beleaguered, poorly performing destroyer, he first had to establish new standards of behavior. He met in small groups with his 300 officers and enlisted men and women to ensure that they understood the rationale for the changes he was implementing and what their personal impact would be. Under his command the ship went not o establish training, readiness, and retention records and won the coveted Spokane Trophy for operational readiness.
Use your hierarchy to communicate new expectations. Have all managers meet with their people and explain the rationale for the change and what this means for them. The more a picture can be created of appropriate new behavior, the more it is likely to become part of each employees’s daily routine.
Have employees create a line-of-sight map between them and your customers. A simpler yet powerful exercise: ask employees to start with their location in the organization and create a visual trail direct to customers. While most are not in direct contact with external customers within the organization. Employees soon realize that a glitch in the internal customer relationship inevitably leads to a problem for external customers.
Put the spotlight on early adopters. In any organizational change there are fence-sitters and early adopters. Fence-sitters do little but sit around, complain about another program du jour, and adopt an attitude of change is good…you go first. In contrast the early adopters make a sincere (though sometimes awkward) effort at trying on the new behaviors to make the strategy work. Since peer success is a powerful influencer, purposely seek out these early adopters and publicly praise their efforts to change.
Ensure each employee has the skills to do what is expected
Once people have an idea of what is expected, it is a mistake to assume that they actually have the necessary skills to accomplish the stated goals. How to start?
Conduct internal best practices research. Identify best performers in each job category and compare them with their marginally performing counterparts. Once critical competences are identified, training exercise can be created to develop these skills in every employee.
Conduct a strategic training audit. This simple process will pay great dividends. Create a matrix that lists the critical competencies required for each job in your company on the left vertical axis and each of your training programs along the top horizontal axis. Then, on a scale of 1 to 5, simply rate each program’s contribution to the development of each competency.
Make your employees your best trainers. Rather than assigning all development to your company trainers, make it part of employees’ jobs to help.
“The consumer, so it is said, is the king…each is a voter who uses his money as votes to bet the things done that he wants done.”
—Anthony Sampson
Motivate each employee to do what is expected
Now comes the hard part: getting people to actually use newly developed skills. Assuming that the compensation and reward systems is running smoothly, what are some of the other practices that can create an organization-wide passion for serving the customer?
Getting everyone in the game. In recent years much has been written about participative management. Why? Because it works. This means engaging in practices like asking employees to help create the vision and values, seeking their opinions on strategic issues, inviting them to create new processes, and authorizing them to solve problems now-without having to go through layers of approval.
Introduce the face of the customer. Of course, appropriate metrics based on customer behavior and feedback are also essential. While the voice of the customer continues to be a critical driver here, consider introducing the face of the customer. This means finding ways to personalize the metrics. For example, videotape focus groups and share the results with every employee. Medical products manufacturer Medtronics keeps employees focused on its real purpose by bringing doctors’ patients and their families into the company to share their stories of survival.
Make it fun. With the seriousness and sometimes outright fear caused by downsizings, mergers, stock price collapses, increased working hours, and a near-magical focus on quarterly earnings, all too often the fun has been squeezed out of work. Last year the United States lost $1.5 billion in productivity to stress-related absenteeism. This is more than the total profitability of the Fortune 500. It is the unquestionable responsibility of leaders to help put the fun back into work.
Changing an organization’s culture is always a complex, even daunting, task. In order to become customer-centered the leaders of a company must first be willing change themselves. It is their responsibility to create the four conditions cited above that will support each and every employee in understanding the new direction, knowing what is expected, and having the skills and motivation to do what is expected.