When companies embark on their journey to becoming a customer centric organization it can seem overwhelming.
Where do they start?
How do they acquire a holistic understanding of their customer base to truly understand the context within which their product/service fits and will be leverage to deliver business results?
How do they align their own operations intelligently to support the customer in a manner which is easy and seamless for their customers versus force fitting customers in their operations to achieve success?
And how do they change their own culture to think more from the customer’s perspective?
It can seem like a daunting task that will go on for a while.
Change does require time and it is something people intrinsically like to avoid.
This is where the importance of quick wins comes in.
Customer-Centric Thinking Takes Time
DesiredPath has a number of customers designing, executing and optimizing their customer centric, intelligent frameworks.
That is, they have mapped out their customer journey from their customer’s point of view considering their business context and how the products/services are going to be leveraged to achieve desired outcomes, and are aligning their own operations to the customer journey accordingly.
This alignment of operations to the customer journey takes time.
The company may need to adjust its organizational structure to better align to their customer’s, develop new roles, plays and tools to better support the customer journey with relevant and timely assistance, and implement systems to track and measure customer data, journey progress and customer feedback.
Most importantly it takes time for the organization’s employees to change their thinking from an inside-out to outside-in perspective.
That is, for them to start putting themselves in the shoes of their customer’s so they can facilitate a journey that is much more seamless for the customer and a better experience for them.
But realizing the benefits of a customer centric organization doesn’t have to wait until everything is operationalized and ready for launch with customers
Quick wins can happen starting from day 1.
The Compounding Power of Quick Wins
An organization does not have to wait until its intelligent framework is ready to be operationalized.
Getting employees to start thinking from the customer perspective already delivers results.
The first quick win can happen immediately after journey mapping has been conducted.
Have employees start to identify and talk about where each customer is within the customer journey.
Add standing agenda items to various internal meetings, including company all-hands, that incorporate a standing agenda item to spotlight customers and where they are in the journey.
This accomplishes a number of objectives in customer centric thinking.
By being able to identify where in the journey each customer is, an employee must understand the customer journey.
In understanding the customer journey, they start to think about the customer’s business context and desired objectives, opening up the broader picture of how a customer wants to leverage the solution.
In other words, they better understand the customer and the context in which they are thinking about or using the product.
This provides better insight into what the customer may be experiencing and trying to achieve which helps the vendor think about how to facilitate a more seamless experience.
These generated ideas for improving and facilitating a better experience can, in turn, be incorporated into the customer centric, intelligent framework for consistent use across the entire customer base.
Specifically, customer centric thinking reinforces customer centric thinking.
Quick wins do not have to be complicated.
Once the journey map is in place, make it real by getting people to talk about the customers.
Thinking from the Customer’s Perspective Reinforces Customer Centric Thinking
In the process of operationalizing a customer centric, intelligent framework, employees are already starting to think in a new, human centric manner.
This leads to opportunities for making incremental change that accelerates the journey to customer centricity.
Quick wins, or simple, incremental change that can be applied right away helps to facilitate the change in thinking an organization needs to go through when shifting to a customer centric approach.
It also helps develop the “organizational muscle” required to be organizationally agile.
That is, the ability for organizations to continually learn from and improve the customer experience, and adapt operations accordingly to support that, on an ongoing basis.
When incremental change is made in parallel to the development of a customer centric business model, the organization will already be thinking from the customer’s point of view when it is time to execute the framework that realizes customer centricity.
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