Excerpts from What customer-centric really means: Seven keys insights
David Stauffer, Harvard Management Update
Simply being customer-responsive or customer-focused is not enough. You've got to go beyond. To get everyone - not just the sales, marketing, and customer-service folks - thinking about customers' needs, and to give them the tools to solve customers' problems.
It goes beyond handling customer calls efficiently. It means addressing all customer issues fully and resolving them completely.
Your people have to be given the tools and incentives they need to push past the presented problem and uncover needs. The customer's immediate problem--the product doesn't work, the invoice is wrong--is often just the tip of the iceberg.
But that's what most reps are trained to respond to. They hear a magic word, such as 'broken,' and interrupt the customer in mid-sentence. When reps are trained to listen carefully and ask follow-up questions, they can push past the presented problem to underlying needs. Result: less frequent callbacks and happier customers.
But reps won't take the time to listen if managers discourage the practice.
It's not just ensuring that your support departments regard frontline workers as their internal customers. It's ensuring that everyone adopts an external focus.
Think less in terms of features (horsepower) and more in terms of its advantages (the reasons why the features are important) and benefits (what the features will do for customers).
It involves more than telling your employees how to treat customers right. You've got to give employees the authority and tools to decide the right way to treat customers.
Your front-line people must be able to decide what to do on the spot.
It's not a matter of steering customers through your Web site or store just the way you envisioned. Customer-centrism means letting customers interact with your locations just the way they want.
There are things customers want to do and things that you'd like customers to do. The customer's needs had better be met, because now customers can switch to your competitors more easily than ever.
It's not just giving customers what they want, it's giving them what they will want.
In the past, a company could compete effectively by assessing consumer preferences through focus groups and test marketing and rolling out a new, improved product the next season. That doesn't work in today's hyper-competitive environment. Today, the imperative is to know what customers will want before they know they want it.
It's not organizing the company to serve customers. It's letting customers determine how you organize.
In the new age of almost limitless customer choice, you're in trouble if your customer-contact people have to say, "That's handled by another department. Please hold while I transfer you." If you really care about customers, you have to reorganize your entire company around customers.
Customer-centrism isn't just about winning new customers from recommendations of current customers. It's about having customers say you should raise your prices.
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