Customer-centricity and Leadership. Is your company ready?
What does being customer-centric mean?
- It means taking a step back to take two forward.
- It means the contrary of being hierarchical: to distribute decisional power to those who operate at the lower levels, in direct contact with the customer, to keep the customer at the centre of your operations.
- It means being a leader also in a way I recently heard from Pietro Jarre during a talk with Alan Advantage, that is, paraphrasing: a “sound weathercock in the wind” — to which I add the necessary skill to affect your company “not linearly”.
Becoming customer-centric is a great cultural change not everyone’s willing to undertake, maybe not even now that the market asks for it.
The alternative? Being kicked out of the market — as it is already happening to banks and the world of traditional finance or other industries where power is dictated by an upward trend, hindering the provision of services within the expected times. Expected by the market and expected by us.
Let me tell you the history of the meaning of customer-centric and why we should adopt this view in a brand-new fashion.
You probably heard it a thousand times: today, to be a winner on the market, you have to plan your strategies zeroing in on your customers’ needs. But then, no one tells you the truth. That is, it’s terribly hard.
The most part of the entrepreneurs I deal with on a daily basis already bent much of their companies to their customers’ tantrums. Or better — trying to be politically correct — to the multiple and diverse circumstances the customers are facing.
For the SMEs, it was a necessity. It became a clever and ‘unfair advantage’. Almost all of them accepted this way of being on the market — and for the market: flexible, agile, able to move with the wind, but extremely fragile if the incoming wave is too big.
Why? Because they became too flexible where they shouldn’t have, namely where growth risks to be affected by a too flexible position (the sales department). At the same time, they became too stiff where flexibility should’ve been the main soft skill to grow organically: management, communication, and marketing.
SMEs are unconsciously customer-centric and have to endure such configuration towards the world of finance and the big global competitors (even if this pain is being increasingly shared between all the stakeholders).
Let’s take the Italian example. 92% of the net worth in the entrepreneurial fabric is “customer-centric” and has always been. However, this is almost entirely due to an unconscious, intrinsic and, of course, strategic dimension of theirs: that of sales. There, where they should’ve enforced more discipline and control — in favour of their finances — they instead developed creative approaches where the sales managers (be it a relative of the family business or a powerful influence) set the terms and do as they please.
On the other hand, instead, we have the big enterprises, colossi of bureaucracy and of hierarchical relationships, where you can’t distribute even an inch of power to the bottom. Where operational bureaucracy is a way for people to evade responsibilities and decisions, to be safe from the storm, and to avoid any kind of decision.
Here “customer-centric” is a never-experimented concept: this is the offer, that’s the approach, period. Hence, all the experimentation moved on the marketing department, creating a new innovative communication. But also a strong dissociation between expectations and experience, when experiencing the contents of communication.
In big enterprises, “customer-centric” has only been a way to reset communication and marketing strategies, creating a huge problem of expectations vs. experience when experiencing the contents of communication.
Banks are proof, from the world of venture finance to that of automotive (even if, as of the latter, they’d do anything to sell you stuff).
Wrapping it up: on one hand, we have an astounding 96% of companies struggling on the sales side and stressing their finances to appease their customers — but that don’t know how to communicate with them or innovate their processes to balance this fragile situation. On the other hand, we have big companies that sweat blood and tears to scream how they care about their customers’ needs — but that, at the end of the day, we can sum up in a series of predetermined marketing patterns or innovative processes that take as long as a geological era.
But someone makes it work.
This picture, indeed, is just a side of the barricade, an increasingly marginal front. There’s a completely different world, made of startups and truly innovative entities. Given their young age or their “experimental” nature (see LEGO “Future Lab” or “Serious Play”, for instance) they can be strongly and comprehensively customer-centric in regards to their efforts to market and design their innovation processes.
How do they do that? Being culturally keen to cease power and control to the lowest segments of the organisation, those that operate strictly in contact with the customer, those that will put the client in the first and foremost position — after all, customers are your most crucial asset.
SMEs cease control and power in those segments they should instead enforce a tighter regulation and hold strong on the remainder — including marketing efforts — reducing their growth opportunities. Big enterprises revolutionise marketing, but struggle to transform the remainder, hindering their route to market with long and obsolete procedures. They let their opportunities slip away like a bar of soap under the shower, ending up in a hostile part of the market where companies innovate all their processes.
The issue isn’t simple: being customer-centric means to serve your own customers in a mission that goes beyond the company’s view of the market (company market and service view). Hence, it means taking on your shoulders the weight of their many problems. It’s a bit like bearing an important and poorly distributed load. You need to be agile in managing your own balance and know what to do not to make it fall on the ground. You have to be able to look “beyond” the process to find quick and effective answers.
To be customer-centric you must be culturally inclined to do so or have the need to change, otherwise you’ll slowly give in the weight of this failed attempt.
There are a number of difficulties. Here are some of the main ones:
- I must change.
- I must change to serve my customers more than my aspirations and/or goals.
- I must change accepting the fact that I will lose my illusory control — given by standard processes — for that part of the company I thought to hold the power onto (though maybe I don’t know anything about).
An entrepreneur already tired to be given commands by the sales department, wants to show he/she has control somewhere in the company: “I mean, the company’s mine and I should be able to show it somehow”.
But if you keep looking at things from this perspective your company becomes an impossible mission. Being customer-centric means the exact opposite of hierarchical: you must cease part of your decisional power to those at the lowest levels, who are in strict contact with the customer, to keep this at the centre of your attention.
If you already ceased a considerable part of your company, the financial component, you won’t be keen to do the same in other departments. Particularly, in the marketing department, where heads and managers go to take back some of their power, to find back some control. Especially if there isn’t any shared knowledge about marketing and the employees are scared to cause any “damage”.
And so, that’s why marketing’s in pain. Both in SMEs and in big enterprises — except those that tried and, today, have to face further “centricity challenges”.
But marketing, in some cases — startups and some big enterprises — gave proof of being feasible and applicable and that in agile and flexible dimensions it can be a winning formula.
A clever choice made by the marketing department concerns the company’s brand, how it is recognised, by what actors, what tone of voice it should have, helping the transition from a solo performance to a choir. Today, the company’s brand is represented by the whole of the personal brands of its employees and partners too. These, being people, are very agile and differently from the company’s strategies and activities, they can exploit this perk. Obviously, according to the values and the direction the company’s brand has in the first place.
This multiplies the touch-points, the voices, the contents, the opportunities, and the speed.
Sure, it was a transformation led by the new kind of engagement of today’s digital dimensions — above all, social media — where the more the merrier. But if you think it through, all of this happened pretty much like a more famous miracle that inspired and dragged the serial industrial production.
The solution? Being functionally stable while constantly in the flux.
Pain aside — and the winning example of marketing — the above-mentioned three difficulties must become opportunities, where to manage the delicate balance between an approach to market led by internal — know-how, expertise, best practices, benchmarks — and external drivers of the company — data analytics, market information, customer behaviour.
If the meaning of a customer-centric configuration is cultural change, then the goal must be to actively interconnect all the activities monitored on the market to the ultimate company mission.
Let’s try to write them again, in this way:
- I must improve and understand in what segment of my company I should implement a customer-centric approach.
- I must find back the potentiality to quickly adjust my goals to what the market asks me.
- I must share with the transitional nature of the market the development of my strategies and cease control, acquiring power from a closer and more efficient position.
Deep down, if we think it through, being customer-centric means being leaders. ’Cause today a leader is who knows how to look at the width of the horizon without forgetting the plethora of colours it is made of; who knows how to be a weathercock in the wind: stable, but directable; and who knows how to affect “not linearly” the course of events.
Being leaders means being customer-centric: implied, evanescent, and changing agents, significant in the course of events.
Versione italiana dell’articolo a questo link.
