Customer Obsessed. Berridge Eric

a legendary tale of customer engagement which was heroic mainly because it was rare and unexpected. In that dark, murky, vendor-driven world of the past 50 years, customers often had little choice but to simply take what came. When exceptional service truly happened, it occurred because someone went out of the way to actually recognize a customer need and align with it without being asked.

      Today, customer engagement has shifted. Customers don't just take what they get; they arrive with an expectation that the brand – the vendor – knows what the customer wants before they do. Paul Papas, head of IBM iX, put it perfectly when he said, “The last best experience anyone has anywhere becomes the minimum expectation for the experience they want everywhere.” Companies need to master customer engagement in order to become that last best experience. Customer engagement is defined by making every customer moment count, regardless of who is delivering it. And to make every moment count, we have to know who our customers are, where they are, what they are experiencing, and what they like and need. On top of all of that, we then have to act on that information and be correct most of the time.

      This isn't as hard as it might seem. One of the biggest changes we have seen in the past five years is a customer's willingness to reveal personal information in an effort to receive better service. In 2011, I gave a presentation to a group of about 100 students at MIT. I asked them point blank: raise your hand if it disturbs you that Facebook is selling your data. Not a single hand went up. Now couple this willingness to share personal information with the availability of social tools to broadcast these likes and dislikes, and suddenly the vendor of yesteryear is presented with a new challenge and an astonishing opportunity to serve the individual tastes and desires of all of its customers. Yet, most still don't get it, and that's the reason for this book.

      The challenge comes from the fact that the consumer and the customer are moving faster than legacy vendors can react. That's why start-ups often succeed against established brands. Start-ups have the ability to quickly leverage the network effect of our connected world to leapfrog basic services and expose almost every established business to one threat or another. That's always been the case, of course, only now it seems to be happening faster and more often.

      So what do customers actually want? There are many answers, as many as the 7.4 billion people on the planet, but after a six-year global polling effort encompassing 150 countries, Jim Clifton, Chairman and CEO of Gallup and author of The Coming Jobs War, was able to reduce it to one: what the world wants is a good job.4 This seems ridiculously trivial until you parse the sentence. The key word is good.

      To succeed at customer obsession and engagement, companies need to find, hire, and retain people who will be engaged in the organization and, most important, with the customer regardless of whether the customer or the interaction falls specifically under their job description. Engaged, customer-focused employees at all levels are required if a company is to become customer obsessed and experience the success that invariably follows.

      Clifton wasn't referring to jobs bagging groceries in a supermarket or ripping admission tickets at the neighborhood cinema complex (another industry desperately remaking itself in the face of streaming media options that dramatically change how customers view movies; essentially anywhere, at any time, from any device, at a range of prices). He was referring to the kind of jobs you need to offer to build an effective customer-obsessed organization. To Clifton, a good job means a job that gives the worker sufficient, steady work that will sustain them over time. He goes on to write: “A good job defines your relationship with your city, your country, and the whole world around you.”5 That also includes the vendors of products and services whose customers will be spending some of the proceeds of that good job with them. Those are the people a customer-obsessed organization needs if it is to know and anticipate what its customers and prospective customers need, even before they know it.

True customer engagement and customer obsession happens when a brand is aligned with a need, and until now, too many brands have survived focused on their own needs, not the customers' needs. Does the legacy brand attitude in Figure 1.1 sound familiar?

Figure 1.1

      Businesses across the world are being disrupted and upended because the rise of digital has enabled some organizations to identify the true needs and desires of customers and fulfill them. And alignment with those needs requires organizations to completely rethink their go-to-market approach and, perhaps even most important, to rethink their employee culture, which lives at the heart of customer engagement.

      Maybe your business is one of those being disrupted and upended, or you suspect it is vulnerable to that. Congratulations; reading this book is a good first move. Or maybe you are one of the disrupters who fear you could also be upended someday. This book will help you, too, by showing what you need to keep the momentum going.

      Let's start with the assumption that your business already has customers or you expect to have some. Let's also assume that you have, or intend to have, employees and partners (suppliers, providers – whatever you want to call them). I present these assumptions because the days of the lone wolf are over. No business (and certainly no individual) can do it all alone. Collaboration is the new byword for success. That means you are going to have to collaborate to succeed. The era of the vertically integrated enterprise that did everything it needed to create and deliver the product to the customer ended in the first half of the twentieth century. Like it or not, it is a new era. The landscape has changed dramatically and continues to shift. Think Netflix. Think Amazon. Think Apple.

      Our world is fast becoming customer-centric. Just listen to the chatter around big data. That might lead you to believe that technology will provide all of the answers. Sorry to disappoint, but technology alone cannot save you in this new customer-centric, collaborative world. This really is not about technology. Is it important? Yes. But no technology gadget will be a savior. The power of the network and social, however, can be a game changer when done right. The instinct of the upstarts to leverage the power of social networks is one reason they are able to leapfrog established enterprise players. Technology that can make frictionless, unnoticed connections with the customer is valuable. But even then, technology alone isn't enough.

      To remain relevant, companies must continuously innovate to deliver an exceptional customer experience. The way to do that is to not only be customer-centric but customer-obsessed. To do this, company leaders must be focused on driving customer obsession throughout the entire company. That means you need to enable your employees to understand your customers as people with individual stories. You also need to tie that focus to the delivery of specific, measurable outcomes. Customer focus without an understanding of how it impacts your bottom line may help in the beginning, but it won't be enough to drive and maintain profitable, positive change.

      Think about it: customers don't care about being served by the so-called right department. Instead, empower your employees to own any customer interaction they touch – however and whenever it may occur. Customers don't care if they are working with someone in accounting, production, or sales. They want their needs met and even anticipated, whenever and wherever you can do it. This kind of customer-centric service requires the free flow of information and collaborative knowledge, which means tight integration between back-end accounting and enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems, front-end customer relationship management (CRM) systems, and anything else that can help satisfy the customer's need. Internal silos must become invisible or nonexistent. Information should flow freely among departments and employees, between everyone and anyone who might encounter the customer in the effort to solve their problems or questions.

      Granted, such innovation and engagement across the enterprise has the potential to be chaotic. Companies must be willing to embrace some chaos for the sake of succeeding in the emerging customer engagement economy, which dictates companies continuously respond to – and preferably get ahead of – the needs of their customers. To that end, every employee and customer touch point must be mobilized to better understand customer needs and improve customer engagement. At the beginning of this chapter,

4

Jim Clifton, The Coming Jobs War (New York, NY: The Gallup Press, 2011), 10–11.

5

Clifton, The Coming Jobs War, 10–11.