customer-centricity

What is it to be a customer-centric enterprise?

I originally wrote today's post for CallidusCloud. It appeared on their blog on December 6, 2017.

“Cindy Barnes passion for genuine customer-centricity in business has made her a great business innovator and strategist. She is now leading Futurecurve after a prolific career in engineering and as Practice Leader at CapGemini. We are honoured to publish her guest post in our blog, dedicated to the “total value proposition” as the best way to create real customer-centricity. It's another great perspective we can give to businesses on how to become more customer centric - and more profitable.” – Stefan Kolle, co-founder of FutureLab.

How do you know if the work you're doing to transform your company's culture is effective and is making an impact?

Customer experience professionals fight hard for the customer and are often challenged when it comes to making the case for improving the customer experience and transforming the company culture to be customer-centric versus other, more easily quantifiable company initiatives.

If I were to ask you to name a company that consistently excels at customer service, what company would come to mind? In you are part of a military family, you might say USAA. If you live in the Southeast, you might tell me about Publix Supermarkets. If you are a golf aficionado, you might share your Masters experience with me. And, if you are passionate about shoes, you might mention either Nordstrom or Zappos. No doubt, others among you would name companies such as Enterprise Rent-a-Car, Chik-fil-A, Apple Stores, Disney, and Mayo Clinic.

Hold the cone!  No, I don’t mean “hold the phone.”  I’m saying “hold the cone” because that’s what ice cream shop workers should do. 

Allow me to explain:

Sam Walton once said, "There is one boss. The customer. And he can fire everybody in the company from the chairman on down, simply by spending his money somewhere else."

The Economist Intelligence Unit has recently published a report titled ‘Outside looking in: The CMO struggles to get in sync with the C-suite’, sponsored by SAS.  This report has showed up as rather interesting for me and I want to share with you that which has caught my interest.

The accepted wisdom is that the marketing function and marketers have the best grasp of customers – their lives, their desires, their concerns…..   Along with this is another piece of accepted wisdom: that the marketing function and marketers are customer-centric or they are the function/people who are the most customer-centric in the organisation.