In most organisations, competencies regarding digitalisation are viewed critically. A Bitkom study shows that a large proportion of working people consider their competencies in digitalisation insufficient. This assessment is understandable against the backdrop of a hype that is, in part, somewhat too great. What is somewhat worrying, however, is that in the same study seven out of ten employees stated that they have no time for further training at work. While in the past digitalisation mainly began in the areas of communication and offering, in future it will be even more about the entire business model. Whoever does not learn here, or has no time for it, may — as in an exam — usually have to repeat. That’s why we view the postulate of simply learning in daily work very critically. You don’t have to repeat all the mistakes that others have already made before you. We are all called upon to continuously train ourselves further. For example, Bill Gates apparently takes a month a year just to read and to integrate the latest findings into his own thoughts and decisions. Improving competencies has a high importance.
In the customer centricity model, customer insights are an organisation’s most important resource and are closely connected with employee and partner insights.
Competencies are repeatable action potentials of an organisation that are based on the use of knowledge, guided by rules and therefore not random, and that enable goal-directed processes both in the context of disposing future performance readiness and in concrete market-supply and market processes. They serve to maintain the competitiveness deemed necessary and, where appropriate, to realise concrete success potentials.
Competencies need to be steered and systematically improved at the individual, departmental, organisational and network levels. In the past, specific competencies were assigned to a certain department in the organisation. Out of the development of marketing, the customer was assigned to the marketing department. The same applies to customer insights, which — if used at all — the market-research department or the online-analytics, CRM department, etc. were responsible for. Since customer insights are the basis for a customer-centric organisation, it is important to establish the acquisition and use of customer insights throughout the entire organisation. Individual organisations such as Zalando have already taken this step. But this requires continuous learning by employees and the acquisition of central constructs of customer centricity. We recommend, for example, also involving employees from the areas of logistics, IT or finance in co-creation workshops. This should help to mirror the requirements of logistics or IT directly with customers’ needs. The challenge is that important constructs of consumer behaviour, such as the halo effect presented and latent needs, are often not known. Statements by participating customers are then interpreted differently and can easily have a negative influence on the further joint cooperation in the organisation. I also repeatedly experience that survey results are not understood by many members of an organisation. Important statistical methods, which usually first make well-founded statements about customers’ responses possible at all — such as significance tests or regression analyses — are not known.
The undertaking of an introduction to the statistical fundamentals while simultaneously interpreting survey results is usually doomed to fail. This challenge is confirmed by market-research companies. Since brands and offerings also increasingly converge, the differences are ever smaller and thus uncovering significant differences between competitors is ever more challenging. So much more needs to be trained, and employees’ knowledge in the area of customer centricity needs to be kept up to date. Many organisations shy away from this path and have, in the past, taken a shortcut by introducing a metric in the organisation and presenting it to all employees as the central target figure. This can be a first step in improving customer centricity, or strengthening awareness. Besides the pure metric, however, the question immediately arises of how it can be improved. This requires in-depth analyses. Without a common competency basis in the area of customer insights, it becomes very challenging to establish a shared understanding.
Competencies and their continuous expansion are important for improving customer centricity. It should be noted that building and maintaining competencies require a sequence of various development steps. Shortening these development steps is often not possible. Empirical studies show that continuous investments in competencies lead to better results than doubling the expenditure while simultaneously halving the investment period. This too is why customer centricity needs time and a systematic transformation. Competencies can be divided into four basic dimensions:
- Personal competencies are abilities to be wise and critical towards oneself, and to develop productive attitudes, values and ideals (self-leadership).
- Activity- and action-oriented competencies are abilities to implement all knowledge, the results of social communication, and personal values and ideals in a strong-willed and active way, integrating all other competencies in the process.
- Technical-methodological competencies comprise the abilities, well equipped with technical and methodological knowledge, to also master difficult problems creatively.
- Social-communicative competencies denote the abilities to engage and contend with others on one’s own initiative, and to cooperate and communicate creatively. Against the backdrop of co-creation and the rising relevance of inter-organisational value creation, this competency is increasingly gaining importance.
Against the backdrop of self-leadership, every individual employee is called upon to address the improvement of competencies. Those responsible in the organisation are called upon to set the direction and to support the acquisition of additional competencies. The organisation is encouraged to develop as specific a competency model as possible for each employee.
