Why Can't We All Just Get Along?
Understanding customers delivers a competitive advantage.
The more you know about your customers, the more you can provide them with products, services, content, and communications specific and relevant to them--consequently increasing all the good stuff: revenue, profitability, loyalty, recommendations, and the like. What's more, the more you know about your customers that your competitors don't know, and the more you use that information to deliver all those relevant, useful products, services, content, and communications that your competitors can't because they don't have that same information, the more likely your customers are to stick with you than start all over with a competitor.
So, then, when it comes to sharing data across the organization--a requirement for the kind of deep customer insight that helps to creates a sustainable competitive advantage--why can't we all just get along? Two words: organizational alignment. Or, more appropriately, organizational misalignment.
Earlier this week the Managed Analytics Practice within 1to1's parent company, Peppers & Rogers Group, hosted a workshop on building a successful customer analytics organization. When we asked the participants to list their top obstacles to success, four emerged as most challenging:
- Having and leveraging the right data for such high-value activities as understanding potential wallet size or determining future value
- Ability to gain credibility for the ROI measurements, especially for the softer benefits
- Data cleanliness and accuracy issues. Including the ability to integrate customer data from multiple silos
- Silos of conflicting responsibilities, and lack of accountability as a result
Interestingly, when we (i.e. all the participants and workshop leaders) discussed as a group the potential solutions to those four obstacles, one underlying issue was repeatedly mentioned as related to each: a lack of organizational alignment. For example, departmental goals and compensation aren't aligned, which creates silos and internal competition instead of cooperation.
The issue is so complex that when I asked my tablemates during lunch what initiative they'd like to put in place to improve that misalignment, one attendee said with exasperation, "The issue is too big. Even if we could introduce, say, a more aligned compensation plan, it would take two years to implement it across the entire organization." He also emphasized that true organizational alignment can't happen without a directive from the CEO, and implied that it would be nearly impossible in a large organization for anyone in marketing other than the CMO to even get in front of the CEO to make the business case for that alignment.
So, what do you think? Is a lack of organizational alignment a significant problem in your company? If so, how are you tackling it? If it's not, how are you achieving that alignment?
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Peppers & Rogers Group founding partner Don Peppers discusses the top four obstacles, and solutions for them, in "Alignment, Compensation, and Engagement" on the Strategy Speaks blog.
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