Two big-picture ways to keep your corporate focus locked on customers

The customer is king.

An atrocious cliché, but what can you do when a truism just keeps getting truer? With the rise of the high-information, social-media-empowered customer, we are punished more swiftly and surely than ever for losing customer focus.

So customer centricity has become more than good practice – it’s a dire necessity.

If this is obvious to the point of banality, why even bring it up? The problem is that we’re tempted to think we’ve got the customer thing covered when in reality we’re constantly taking our eye off the ball. The customer typically stands at the very end of a long process chain and it’s easy to get distracted during the steps along the way.

Here are a few of the most common signs that the customer has slipped out of focus:

• Sales pitches talk mostly about products and features, not customer needs and solutions
• There is no formal system for capturing feedback and opinions from customers.
• Top executives (including the CEO) do not personally spend time with customers.
• Staff incentives focus on internal metrics rather than customer outcomes.
• There are no defined customer personas or other ways of formally describing, segmenting and characterizing customers.
• Marketing communications deliver the same message to everyone.
• The corporate mission statement spells out what the company does or wants to do rather than what it promises to do for customers.

To be consistently customer-centric, an organization needs to pull customer consciousness backwards from the actual customer transaction – typically the sale – into all the earlier process steps. Many companies actually do a good job of keeping the customer in mind during the very early strategy-building stages. The problem is more likely to be found in the middle executional steps between strategy and customer fulfillment.

There are lots of particular actions a company can take to keep the customer in focus throughout the organization. Most of them fall into one of two big-picture categories.

1. Technology and analytics

One-to-one marketing has been a hyped-up holy grail for marketers for at least 30 years. I remember in the early 90s sending out a direct mail piece with customers’ names laser-printed onto the blank license plates in a car photo. The packages were otherwise identical, but we were oh so proud of our high-tech “one-to-one” prowess.

Well, one-to-one marketing is still being oversold, but it’s a whole lot closer to reality than it was in those early days. Today’s marketing automation systems do a pretty good job of tracking individual customer interactions and enabling automated, targeted communications. Technology has made marketing more customer-driven and more accountable while also easing the divisions between marketing and sales.

Technology has done much the same for market research. So many actions that customers take nowadays leave a digital trail that the possibilities for data capture and analysis have exploded. Despite the buzz and over-selling, big data tells us things about customer behavior we never dreamed of knowing and that we’ve hardly begun to explore.

The nice thing about today’s customer-oriented information technologies is that once a good system is in place, the algorithms don’t get bored, lose focus, exaggerate or engage in wishful thinking (analysis is a different matter, but let’s let that one lie).

We’ll call the overall category “automated personalization”. It’s an important and growing customer-focus tool and you’re probably under-invested in it.

2. Corporate brand

Brand thinking has come a long way since the Mad Men days. The corporate brand in particular is now regarded by customer-centric companies as a strategic tool that drives not only marketing communications but operations and processes across the board.

The brand serves a vital strategic role because it defines the company’s relationship to the customer. Starting with the customer value proposition (stating how the brand will make life better for customers), a well-constructed brand provides a north star of purpose and a common set of characteristics, values and messages that guide the company’s actions across functional silos and geographic regions. Because the brand is consciously designed to be bold, memorable, accessible and emotionally appealing, it’s the ideal “sticky” link between strategy and execution. Nobody remembers a strategy paper after six months; everyone remembers the brand.

The key to achieving customer centricity via brand is a highly disciplined process of internal brand activation and brand operationalization that ensures that all internal actions are fulfilling the brand promise. To see the process through requires a major commitment from management, but companies like Apple, BMW, Caterpillar or Uniqlo will tell you that it’s worthwhile.

Why aren’t we more customer-centric?

Circling back to the original customer-is-king cliché, if we all know it to be true, why isn’t every company customer-centric?

I believe one reason is that both of the two broad categories of solutions I’ve identified here are pretty new—technologically in the case of automated personalization and conceptually in the case of brand. Most of us have simply not kept up with the changes taking place.

A second reason may be that both the information automation and brand activation solutions require significant investment, including specialist expertise that will most likely come from outside the company. It’s difficult (although by no means impossible) to measure improved customer centricity it a way that will convincingly define the ROI.

Reasons for inaction are never hard to find. But neither are the dangers and lost opportunities of a weak customer focus. Eyes on the prize!