(Excerpt taken from Stephen Hewett's paper "The right way to do the right thing for the customer")
Did you know that in most organisations, between 50% and 70% of internal effort expended doesn’t actually add any value to what the organisation is achieving for its customers? These research findings seem - and are - alarming. But when you consider what people say about the calibre of customer service they receive from many organisations, perhaps the findings are not especially surprising.
The question is... what can be done to improve the situation?
The secret of business success unfortunately is just that - a secret, and trying to learn from the successes of other people and businesses is rarely the answer. Having the 20/20 vision of hindsight is a completely different thing from knowing it. Fortunately, though, there are some extremely useful strategies that can take you far along the Yellow Brick Road to your own personal pot of business gold. The best ones offer you powerful new ways of getting real clarity on the ideas, approaches and tactics that can lead to success beyond even your most optimistic expectations.
One of the most useful, interesting, empowering and transforming strategies in the business world today is Customer Centricity.
Customer Centricity brings you back to basics. It brings you back into intimate contact with the reasons why you decided to set up a business - or work in a particular industry - in the first place. Indeed, one of the insights so often liberated by the new types of thinking inspired by Customer Centricity is that it’s too easy, in the hubbub of corporate and professional life, to forget those reasons. This forgetfulness can apply to anyone at an organisation. Senior executives, and even Board members, are far from being immune to it.
Yet Customer Centricity, properly deployed, is much more than a mere antidote to this forgetfulness. At its best, Customer Centricity can transform an organisation into being everything it can be, but which it can so easily fail to be.
The role of Customer Centricity in business today is still evolving. All the same, we do need a working definition, and an informal definition might be the process of ensuring that every individual and department within an organisation is taking every step feasible to add value to what the organisation does for its customers.
It is useful to work towards a more formal definition, which includes details of the actual processes whereby Customer Centricity can be achieved. But this is more useful if we first set Customer Centricity in context as a business strategy today.
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(Download the full whitepaper “The right way to do the right thing for the customer”)
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