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Customer Centric Organization & Net Promoter System Many organizations use terms like customer centric and customer focused, but unless there is a clear strategic intent starting at the executive level, it is unlikely to manifest itself in like behaviour. And even then it is not guaranteed, it takes a systemic approach to ensuring all aspects of the company are aligned to the strategy. Often the 1Net Promoter System is deployed at the core of the change. Launching a customer centric strategy involves a pervasive organizational change, which follows a logical order. As I have learnt through many transformations it must start with a clear strategy and is followed by organizational structure change, business process and then people change. Technology change should be after or in conjunction with process change. 1. Aligning the Organization with the right roles, and accountabilities to support and deliver the strategy is a critical first step. 2. Business process is reengineered to deliver against the objectives of the strategy. 3. People changes involve changing the beliefs, often characterized as the culture, and behaviours of people whilst operating the processes. 4. Technology provides the tools to support, and is of little use unless all of the above have been addressed to support the strategy. A lot of organizations that have launched a customer centric strategies go on to use the 2Net Promoter Score ( NPS) as a KPI for the senior executives and even apportion a large part of the executive bonus to an improved score. Others will also appoint Chief Customer Officers to own elements of the monitoring process and evangelize the cause. Whilst these are 2 important elements in the alignment of the organization to the strategy, it is not enough. Most elements of an organizations structure have some bearing on how customers perceive a company and therefore the accountabilities and responsibilities in these roles need to change to meet the strategic objectives. I was Head of Customer Management in an organization where the market was expanding rapidly and my peer who was heading up products had a mantra of speed to market in order to be first to market with the latest product idea. Unfortunately there were many trade offs most of which impacted the customer, such as difficult activation, unreliable billing, and ill prepared customer support. In every functional role there are going to be competing priorities with the customer centric strategies, such as sales revenue targets, and cost constraints, so it is important the organizational structure, roles and accountabilities reflect the importance of the customer centric strategy. 1 Net Promoter System is a practical framework to support and improve Net Promoter Score. 2 NET Promoter Score (NPS) is a customer loyalty metric developed by (and a registered trademark of) Fred Reichheld, Bain & Company, and Satmetrix

Business processes in most organizations have evolved over many years, with redesign occurring as a result of the introduction of technology or a major reorganization. An important first step is establishing 3Voice of the Customer (VOC) closed loop process. A well-designed VOC process should give real insight to what business processes are the causes of customer dissatisfaction, and what is working to delight customers. From there the work starts to get to the root cause of the service break down and then to action in fixing the cause. Areas of cause are often: - Poor navigation design on the web, within the Contact Centre IVR and call routing design, leading to customers not getting to the right area to resolve their query. Lack of knowledge by service staff, as a result of under investments in training or high staff turnover. Information systems not supporting frontline staff and customers on the web in resolving their issues. Poorly designed KPI, performance management and reward systems for staff. Often driving them to move quickly to a cross sale or to wrap up the call as quickly as possible, so they can make their sales quotas and stay within call handling targets.

People or cultural change is one of the most critical aspects of aligning the organization to meet the customer centric strategies. More often than not it is the way customers that are treated when they come into contact within an organization, rather than the product itself, that effect their impression of a company. After many years in the airline industry I learnt that whilst flight disruption and baggage loss continue, even with the best operational management, it is how the airline recoveries the situation with the customer that has the lasting effect on customer loyalty. In fact, there has been a great deal of research that demonstrates that when a customer encounters a service breakdown and the organization recovers the situation through a caring supportive service interaction, the customer is often more loyal than prior when there were no service issues. Of course knowledgeable empowered employees are required in place in order for them to recover the situation for the customer, but they also need to genuinely care about helping the customer. Whilst you would think serving customers would motivate most people that take on customer service roles, it is not always the case. So ensuring the recruitment process is designed to attract and select service-orientated candidates is a critical start. From there it is about a focus on customer centric behaviours. Often organizations spend too much time looking at KPIs and outcomes such as sales revenue or process rates, without observing behaviours, managing to correct poor behaviours and celebrating those that are aligned to the company values. It is important to understand that values themselves cannot be monitored or managed, only 3 Voice of Customer (VOC) a closed loop process of actively listening to customers, analyzing root cause of their feedback and redesigning business process, products and operations to respond to feedback.

behaviours that demonstrate those values. Companies that issue corporate values without managing the underpinning behaviours will fail to deliver on the values, and probably look hypocritical to both employees and customers. After I joined a large bank, while I was in the process of listening to a number of customer calls within telephone banking to get a sense of the service. I distinctly remember one call I listened to in which a customer was seeking some assistance with their Cheque account. The customer was a farmer who was apprehensive in explaining his problem. The bank service consultant explained that there was little he could do and gave a solution the farmer said was not practical, and then concluded with is there anything else I can help you with today the farmer responded by saying not really, but he really needed some help with the Cheque account, to which he got the same answer as before, with another attempt to close the call with is there anything else I can help you with today. After listening to the call, and cringing throughout it, I went to the call quality control group to ask how it would of scored and to my disappointment I was told it would have been graded as an 8 out of 10. The reason was that the consultant followed the procedure and of course concluded with a request to see that there was anything else he could help with. The fact that there was no demonstrated care, or attempt to resolve the customers problem, even if it meant escalating to someone else that could help. And the line of is there anything else I can help you with today was a way to wrap up the call as quickly as possible rather than a genuine intent to help. The important point is that if behaviours demonstrating empathy, care and issue resolution were the measures for the call, it probably would have scored 2. Procedures and KPIs are important, but only effective when managed in conjunction with the behaviours required to deliver on the strategic objectives. A common approach to organizational cultural change, or organizational behavioural change, is through events that are designed to motivate the workforce to change through an enlightenment approach. Again these events have their place, often in launching the strategy, but will be short lived unless the organization clearly sets out behavioural expectations and hold people accountable for demonstrating the behaviours, starting with the leaders. It also leaves employees cynical, as they dont believe the organization is serious about being Customer Centric, and the events get characterized as a sheep dip approach to change. Technology advances generally outpace business need and therefore investing in the latest technology usually means that business practice and processes are not at a maturity level to utlise the technology effectively. Whether it is customer segmentation and targeting or developing closed loop customer feedback and analytics, it is important to have practices and capability in place before, or at the same time as investing in the technology. All too often technology is seen as the silver bullet to the strategy, when it is a tool for the business process, which supports the strategy. About the author ; Louis Dup is a 20 year veteran of customer centred change at some of Australias largest corporations. He has his own consultancy practice specializing in customer management.

Email: - [email protected] LinkedIn http://au.linkedin.com/pub/dir/Louis/Dupe/