Are You Customer Centric or Just Pretending?
Your customers can then lead your company in new directions—if you let them. But that will require you to rethink the very nature of your organization. If you really want to listen to customers, give them personalized service, and reward them for loyalty, then you have to reorganize your entire company around customers. To do this requires an enterprisewide commitment to sharing customer data, and the reinvention of how every department in the company should interact with customers.
This isn’t revolutionary thinking in business, but imagine my surprise at last week’s Forrester’s Marketing Forum when executives from CA and UPS were asked during a panel session if becoming a customer-centric organization means reorganizing the company around the customer and their response was “no.”
They explained: “I don’t think companies can afford to,” and “I don’t think it’s necessary to go that far.” Only Marc Ruggiano, senior vice president of marketing at check printing company John H. Harland, said that reorganizing ensured customer-centric business practices and then explained his own client-facing marketing strategy.
Companies that are known for being customer centric haven’t launched a one-time event or slogan; they’ve embraced and adopted a daily philosophy and mindset. Take Schneider Electric, for instance. CEO of Schneider Electric David Petratis has built a customer-facing organization to ensure ongoing commitment that customers’ issues are heard across the enterprise, understood, and acted upon. As a result, at Schneider Electric customer satisfaction is up, on-time delivery has increased, and field defects have decreased substantially.
The process of becoming customer centric can be risky and painful, but is well worth the work. Unless you require every person to understand customers’ needs and listen to feedback, create targeted client-facing teams, and ingrain this way of thinking in your operations, you’re not really customer centric, you're just pretending.
You shouldn't have been surprised by their answer. Organizational structure is a function of strategy -- not the other way around (Drucker said that, and a lot more eloquently).
Reorganizing "around the customer" without putting other strategic components in place (like incentives and rewards, for one) won't make a firm customer-centric.
And neither will simply appointing a "chief customer officer."