For a long time, customers, citizens, and other stakeholders have been viewed as a source of business and operational risk. But, times are changing. The modern business world demands that change.
If you ask customers the right questions, listen in a different way, and let customers share feedback on their terms, then you’re moving toward finding new sources that can alert you to certain risks.
Examples include website vulnerabilities, policy dangers and shortcomings, employee attrition, top hiring losses, confidentiality breaches, citizen safety, expensive marketing missteps, and potential social media firestorms.
How to become a customer centric organization
I was recently asked a great question online:
“Love the perspective shift of viewing customers as partners rather than the subjects of our investigatory experiments. You said it’s relatively uncharted territory, but any first steps you would recommend to an org trying to initiate that shift?”
Changing your colleagues’ mindsets surrounding how customers are viewed takes culture shift, patience, and time. It’s important to know how to influence change, or validate that what you’re already doing is the right thing.
From where I sit, influencing a shift in perception is about humanizing the customers, citizens, intermediaries, and other stakeholders associated with your organization. Here are some inexpensive ways to initiate the shift.
1.) Democratize the customer X (experience) and O (operational) data. “Democratize the data” simply means sharing customer experience data in a widespread manner throughout your organization in a way that creates a reaction from people.
It doesn’t really matter if it’s the reaction you hoped for, initially. The purpose is to put customers in the company’s conversations the same way profits, expenses, staffing, and technology get “air time” internally.
How-to: Play a contact center recording at a team meeting. Share a chart of your company’s progress toward reducing customer wait times. Set up a page on your company’s intranet site where you can post customer survey results or testimonials. Share survey findings with your organization’s board of directors or advisory committee. I also love Jeanne Bliss’ concept of building a customer room.
2.) Start a conversation. Most of the customer experience work at any organization is about socializing concepts, especially if you’re just getting started.
How-to: Share a customer anecdote with your colleagues over a lunch meeting or happy hour drinks. It may sound simple, but anecdotes humanize quantitative data. And almost everyone has a story of how a customer’s life has been impacted by the work of their agency or company.
The good news is, the person you share a customer story with probably has their own they can share with you as well. More good news: having a conversation is completely free. So, make it a habit to speak up with those stories.
3.) Include customers in the business. I’m talking about inviting the actual live human beings who are your customers to be part of company activities.
How-to: Ask customers to participate on advisory boards, in a customer appreciation day, or as a speaker at a conference or special event.
In my past life in B2B CX, my firm brought the CEO of a priority account into planning meetings where we talked about how we wanted to deepen our relationships and opportunities with his company. Consider creating a client advisory board to bring more client-related context to business and personnel matters. Host customer and intermediary roundtables at industry events where risk-oriented topics oftentimes came to the surface.
Customers aren’t outsiders to your business – they’re part of your business. Without their stories and experiences as part of the day-to-day business conversation, you don’t have the full picture of your company’s risks (or opportunities).
Changing mindsets of your fellow executives is smart move that will require your time and attention. But the work is most certainly worth doing.
