Customer Focus is a misunderstood concept and in particular, business practice. Often when you speak about customer focus, businesses relate it to customer service and highlight how they are seeking to improve their service levels. Customer focus has, I believe, little to do with customer service. Some service initiatives, for example such as automated telephone answering systems, have nothing to do with service or the customer, and are all about cost reductions.
While on that point, cost reduction initiatives are usually driven by a short-term focus on profit but often lead to a decline in customer focus and eventually sustainability of the business.
A recent article in the HBR Blog by Graham Kenny, titled ‘Customers Are Better Strategists Than Managers’ reflected a story where the newly appointed CEO came to a realization that he was looking at the business from the inside and not the outside in. His focus was operational and that they did not know their customers needs particularly well. Graham in his blog suggests tapping into your stakeholders and going beyond your current customers as a way to get your business establishing an outside in view.
Seeking others’ persepctive is always a good starting point in almost anything you do. But when it comes to establishing what I would describe as a Customer Focus within your organisation, you must go well beyond seeking to gain others’ insights. A business that has a well-established customer focus, looks at everything they do through the eyes (needs) of the customer and makes every decision based upon a single question, ‘will it improve the value we deliver to our customers’? If yes, lets do it, if no lets drop it.
There exists an underlying principle (paradigm) that I believe underlies the imbedding of a customer focus in your business. Put simply, if your focus is on the customer and delivering more value than anyone else then profits will follow. If however, you focus on profit first you will lose your customers and eventually your profits.
I would just like to consider a final aspect on customer focus before looking at some ways to establish it in your business. Customers in theory, should understand well why they buy your product and what value they see in it. However, honestly, it may not be evident to them in a way which allows you to build an effective competitive strategy, so just asking may not get you where you want to be. In addition, competitive strategy is about dynamic positioning. Its about always moving to a position of strength as against other offerings in the marketplace (no, thats not playing the price game). Growing a customer focus and understanding customer value will support your business keeping ahead of the competition by delivering greater value. To always win you must lead your customers to their next level of need and continually redefine what value means to them. In this way you are always stepping ahead of your competitors and repositioning before they even understand where you presently are. This is the essence of customer focus, the ability to continually deliver more customer value than anyone else every day of the year, year after year. This is the strength that a customer focused business can deliver. A strength few achieve and a strength many do not even recognise can be achieved.
Back to basics, what are some of the key essentials to commence building a customer focused organisation that you can begin to work on:
- Develop a purpose for your business that is aligned with the needs of the customer. Purpose is not about profit, purpose is the reason why your business exits and the needs it seeks to meet in the community. Purpose should be expressed in a way that transcends your current product or service and is linked to need. An example, I often cite, is the company that manufacture pens against the company that provides people with a way to express their thoughts. They produce the same product but see their purpose quiet differently.
- Articulate the value that your believe you deliver to your customers and make that a core foundation of your competitive strategy. Now continually focus on improving that value every moment of everyday across the entire business. You know what that value is, you’ve articulated it. So now you can test, refine, improve and importantly compound – ‘better everyday’.
- Design your organization so that it is focused on delivering more value to your customers everyday. There is a great academic article titled ‘Organigraphs: Drawing How Companies Really Work’ by Mintzberg and Van der Heyden that will assist you in developing a model of how your business really works. Use this article as a guide to draw your business but make sure the customers are the focus. Your business is not reflected by a organisational chart it is better reflected in a diagrammatical way that depicts how all the parts come together to deliver greater customer value.
- Innovate to deliver greater customer value and see beyond where customers presently understand their needs to be and create and deliver that value. I’ve touched on this point above where I unpacked customer focus. At this time I will simply say you need to build your competitive engine to make this happen.
- Make the metric of increased customer value pervasive throughout your entire organization and against which everything is decided and measured.
Delivering greater customer value is the basis of competition into today’s markets. It requires a customer focused organization which must know its customers intimately and continually lead them to higher levels of value. You should understand your customers needs (for today and importantly tomorrow) better than they know you, your business and themselves.
Image:
© Pindiyath100 | Dreamstime.com – Customers At Apple Store Hong Kong Photo
