Many CEOs are looking to turn their organisation into a customer-focused one, but let’s take a step back and look at what that actually entails.
Does every CEO perceive customer experience activities the same way? Is the CEO familiar with all the possibilities we have to choose from when trying to become a customer-focused organisation? These are difficult questions.
In many organisations, Mr. Marketing thinks about improving the website to increase sales while Mr Product Manager thinks about reducing production costs by getting rid of features customers don’t appreciate. They are both right, but there are also many other ways of increasing customer value. The question becomes how to identify the potential and implement it throughout the organisation.
Boye Aarhus 16 conference keynote speaker Claudia Urschbach has spent the past 18 years of her career helping organisations such as BBC, Siemens, Carl Zeiss, the German newspaper giant Süddeutsche Zeitung and many others to become customer-focused. In her experience, developing and implementing a strategy sets off a chain reaction of changes in many different corners of your organisation.
1. Identifying the value potential in your product
Claudia emphasizes that the first step in providing value to your customers is identifying how your product is actually currently providing value. This analysis needs to be in depth, which is why Claudia believes the recently published 30 elements of customer value will be a game changer.
This table expands upon Maslow’s hierarchy of needs and breaks down concepts into their fundamental building blocks. If the customer describes the product as convenient, often it will really mean a combination of time saving, simplifying and effort reducing.
The table operates with four general categories that provides you with a great overview. It can help open your eyes to those areas where further development of your product and organisation could provide increased customer value. Perhaps your product is already providing functional value, but could be providing emotional value as well.
2. Implementing it throughout your organisation
Once you have identified the value potential of your product, it is time to turn you organisation into one that is able to provide that value.
Claudia points to change management as being vital for this to work. Where you should start the process, becomes extremely important:
“As always with change management you have to be clever with your decision where you start. You want to reach momentum quickly and without the effect of demotivation in your teams.”
You want to ask yourself which activities have the biggest positive impact, cause the least tension and bring return of investment quickest?
Becoming a customer-focused organisation is much easier and cost-effective when you have a dedicated customer experience strategy that clearly points to specific ways and areas where the product and organisation could be providing more value to its customers.
Learn more about customer experience
Customer experience is on everyone’s lips and professionals are going at it from different angles. In two other recent postings I have spoken with professionals who deliver perspectives that might also prove to be food for thought:
You can also learn more about the hot topic in our customer experience peer group or at the upcoming Boye conferences.