WHY focus on people?
Gone are the days where customers came to your shop and bought what you recommended them. The future customer is always on, informed and has all the shops at his finger tips. The entitled (believing oneself to be inherently deserving of privileges or special treatment) customer has different expectations going as far as products shipped to before they even order them. At the same time their attention span is very short and only partial, as they are connected all the time and trying to do several things at the same time. The convenience and individual treatment of service is always compared with best ever experience and not just with competitors (read more about Customer Experience Management – German language).
Additionally, technology is changing exponentially and organizations, respectively the people in them, change only logarithmically. This makes it hard to get the full value out of new technology. The even greater connectivity, thanks to technology, allows for completely new business models where long standing value chains can be short cut and a lot of new opportunities arise. In the case of established companies, there is the danger of being digitally disrupted, if they do not leverage their existing assets properly and adapt to the new environment.
What to focus on?
Many companies believe that they are customer centric organizations and offer great experiences, but only very few customers see it the same way. So to really become customer centric, you need to start thinking outside in and truly try to understand your customers. You need to understand the needs of your customers and help them to fulfill them with your service. You can only build long term relationships, if you provide true value to them.
As customer expectations and needs are constantly changing you need to become more agile as an organization. The core elements are to focus more on people, tangible results, customer collaboration as well as the ability to respond to change. The goal of agile in this context is to “Deliver most value with given resources at the earliest possible time at highest quality to your customer”. To achieve this, the right people are crucial and in today’s world the demands towards employees are ever higher. You should be looking for plus-shaped people, which opposed to T-shaped people not only have a broad knowledge and deep expertise, but are also able to think on a strategic level.
How to focus on people?
Customer centricity and agility you cannot just start doing, this requires a change process affecting the people inside your organization. But change is something you need to enable, as people dislike it.
To ease the pain of change you need to take everybody on the journey. Communicate a clear vision of what you want to achieve and why the change is required. Another major factor is that you ensure short term wins, because only if people experience a positive effect of the change, they are willing to change more. And last but not least change is not a one time thing you can do, it needs to become a constant part of your organization.
Stop technology-first approaches.
To shift to a customer and service mindset you need to involve the whole organization and not only those exposed to the customer directly. Service design can be approached to ensure not only looking on the before part (the customer acquisition) of the customer life-cycle, but on their entire life-cycle including even after they stopped using your service. At the same time you need to balance customer needs with your business goals as well as your organizational capabilities. Additional insights on what makes your customer really tick are invaluable and can sometimes be based on a single data point.
To be more effective in fulfilling customer needs you need to stop using technology-first approaches by buying new tools instead of understanding the required capabilities and current maturity of the organization. Too many organizations start with tool evaluations and IT implementations and only learn on the way what they really want to achieve and often realize that the chosen tool is not the right one anymore.
Purpose. Autonomy. Mastery.
Worldwide employee engagement is only at 13% according to gallup.com. Stimulus programs do usually not improve it, because it they are more like adrenaline shots which wear of faster and faster. Therefore an important element beside having the right employees, is to provide them an environment, where they find purpose, so they know why they are doing things, autonomy to do things in the most efficient way and mastery so they constantly develop and become experts in what they do.
Doing all this your organization should be ready for the future, because:
This article is based on my keynote, held a the Sitecore Digital Marking Day in Zürich, March 2017.
You find the presentation at https://oddeven.slides.com/oddeven/its-about-people-not-technology/
Below you find also a video of the presentation from the event.
