Earlier this month I had the honour of being affectionately introduced as the “warm-up act” for Fred Reichheld during an NPS masterclass he gave together in the Netherlands. As Fred mainly focused on introducing the Net Promoter System and describing the dangers of bad profits, I decided to go for the more organisational aspects of customer-centricity. I did this by focusing my talk on what I consider to be three of the main barriers to customer-centricity in many organisations:
a. Companies manage the customer’s experience “on top” of regular business.
In these businesses, the customer experience is given to a project group or department. But the rest of the business continues to work with the same KPI’s and silo-mindsets it has always had. The result is that no one really has the accountability or authority to take the customer experience bull by the horns. In other words, nothing really happens.
b. Companies roll the dice on their customer experience
Many companies have taken years to build processes, habits and “best practices”. But these are typically driven from their own, or a consultant’s beliefs. They often ignore key steps of value to the customer. As a result, these businesses “roll the dice” on the steps in the customer journey they aren’t actively managing. And when you roll the dice, things will go wrong.
c. Leadership doesn’t walk the customer experience talk.
Many excutives talk a good game when it comes to customer experience. But when the budgetary rubber hits the road, quarterly figures and annual bonuses based on non-customer-oriented KPI’s speak louder. Faced with non-committed leadership, the message on what really matters is clear to the people in the organisation and the customer gets relegated to last place.
While there are obviously more barriers to customer-centricity, I believe that only those companies which are truly willing to confront some of the above have a fighting chance of becoming customer centric.
Do you recognise these barriers from your business? Have you got others which you think should have been on this TOP 3 list? If so, please share below.
The full presentation I gave you can find in the Slideshare below. Oh yes, and if you want more, you can find the full story here 😉
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