To better understand the process for improving customer centricity, it is important, as a first step, to look more closely at possible deficits in optimising customer centricity:
- Reducing customer centricity to customer management
- Too strong a focus on the operational measures of customer management
- Conceptual and methodological deficits in determining customer value and customer net benefit (customer-firm value)
- Failure to use developed customer segments
- Equating customer satisfaction and customer loyalty
- Neglecting soft skills (leadership and culture in implementing customer centricity)
- Isolated optimisation of individual aspects of customer centricity — without coordinating them with one another
Customer centricity is a dominant logic that concerns leadership, culture, competency management and processes in particular — and not just customer management. The reduction by those responsible to individual aspects of customer centricity is to be halted with the process visualised above.
The five stages of the process for improving customer centricity
In the first stage of the process for improving customer centricity, it is important to inspire the organisation for the topic of customer centricity. If possible, the elements ‘burning platform’, ‘prophet’ and ‘reduction of retarding forces’ should be combined. This stage can be compared to waking up in the morning and should therefore be done very gently. Most organisations will so far have pursued a different dominant logic. Management is called upon to introduce new guiding principles into the organisation and thereby establish a basic understanding of the urgency, but also an initial enthusiasm. In addition, taking norms and artefacts into account, a first impulse should be achieved to improve customer-centric commitment and, subsequently, customer-centric citizenship behaviour. Customer centricity in the waking-up stage can only happen top-down. All approaches from individual specialist departments or business units will sooner or later fail. In addition, norms and artefacts are important elements for improving customer centricity. These should be based on the guiding principles. The two central guiding principles are that customers are the reason for the joint cooperation and that customer centricity increases profit. As a fundamental norm, the requirement should be established that every decision in the organisation is to be made on the basis of customer insights and should increase the customer-firm value.
In the second process stage of the process for improving customer centricity, it is important to understand the existing level of customer centricity as well as the respective strengths and weaknesses, and to discover possible potentials. For this, our Customer Centricity Maturity Check can be used in a first step. After the first assessment by means of the Customer Centricity Maturity Check, the interview guide for checking individual readiness for change can be used at management level. With this, management can, depending on the result of the Customer Centricity Maturity Check, analyse how transformation requirement and readiness relate to each other. These insights need to be complemented with an understanding of the success potentials. Building on the trend analysis, the customer purchase process analysis, and the additional acquisition of customer insights based on the analysis of the customer-firm value, it is important to determine and assess success potentials for the organisation. Afterwards, based on the internal strengths and weaknesses as well as the external success potentials, strategic initiatives should be developed. These should be assessed in a further step. Here, above all the strategic wins are in the foreground. At this point, too, it should be repeated: improving customer centricity has a medium- to long-term perspective. It can be helpful at this point to develop various design options for the individual strategic initiatives. Strategic work aims above all at learning, and not at correctly predicting the future. Working out various options for the individual initiatives is helpful in keeping the learning curve high.
In the third stage of the process for improving customer centricity, it is important for management to prove itself to the employees. Most organisations propagate that they are customer-centric. Only the fewest employees believe that. Through a roadmap and a playbook, it should be communicated in a way understandable to every employee what goals exist regarding customer-value-based decision-making, which areas the customer-centric transformation affects, how co-creation develops further, and how customer management is adapted. It must not be forgotten that these two elements, in the sense of artefacts, have an important importance in influencing customer-centric commitment and customer-centric citizenship behaviour.
The fourth process element, ‘transform’, is less a stage than a continuous activity. It comprises a considerably longer period than the previous stages. Customer management should always only be adapted once the organisation possesses the necessary competencies due to the transformation. In the past, the focus in improving customer centricity was on resources in the sense of budget and often technology. The customer-centric transformation is oriented towards the employees and comprises the entire organisation. The two most important elements are the successful implementation of a lighthouse and securing inclusion. Even though the approach and the term ‘lighthouse’ are now burnt out in many organisations, it is nevertheless important to achieve continuous successes at individual points in the organisation and to keep enthusiasm for the topic of customer centricity high. Successes are to be divided into outcome successes and learning successes. Management is called upon to communicate the successes regarding the improvement of customer centricity continuously over a longer period. We have so far not experienced any organisation that communicated the individual successes over time too extensively. The emphasis should also be increasingly on changing the organisation and not on changing customer management. The better the transformation ability, the higher the potential to design customer management optimally. In general, we can only wish organisations more courage in internal communication. In addition, attention needs to be paid to inclusion during the transformation. Inclusion concerns the different departments as well as the entire network. Power, fears, heterogeneous competency endowments and much more will, sooner rather than later, slow down the customer-centric transformation like chewing gum.
But no organisation can be changed constantly. Transformation means entering a refreezing phase again and again. In the last stage of the process for improving customer centricity, ‘reinforce’, it is important to practise and perfect the changes in the organisation before a new change cycle can be started. That’s why planning is an important element of customer centricity — also, by all means, in the context of customer management, but also for the customer-centric transformation.
