Over recent years, the issue of customer centricity has become more and more prevalent in board meetings and as a result has found its way onto the mission statements, customer charters and financial reports of companies across multiple sectors. But while most companies talk the talk, many fall short of realising the significant benefits of a successful, sustainable program. This, the first of a two-part Customer Engagement report investigates one of the key foundations for success: ownership.
Fizzback’s experience in working with a number of leading brands has taught us that there’s no such thing as a “one size fits all” methodology. Customer centricity means different things to different companies and needs to start with an alignment with the organisation’s strategic goals. A clear understanding of specific, desired business outcomes must form the foundation for any successful program. From this, the measures of success (in reaching those desired business outcomes) need to be clearly defined and a robust methodology for tracking and reporting them should be built, in a close collaboration between key organisational stakeholders.
Two fundamental elements that we consistently see as critical success factors are ownership and operational integration. In the second part of this Customer Engagement Report we’ll cover operational integration; this report will focus on ownership.
Ownership
The metrics and key performance indicators (KPIs) that a company chooses to track and monitor are clearly important. Nevertheless, unless these measures map to desired business outcomes and the company at large takes genuine ownership of them, they won’t in and of themselves be of any clear benefit.
Ownership is about infusing the metrics into the company’s DNA and ensuring they are a clear extension of the company’s brand values. We believe that ownership can be broken down into three components, “The 3 Cs of Ownership”: Commitment, Consistency and Culture.
Commitment: Of time, of human and financial resources and towards continuous improvement. All levels of the organisation need to commit to owning the metrics and KPIs chosen. Integrating KPIs into bonus payments is a popular and effective way of driving commitment.
Consistency: Of purpose. It’s important to avoid conflicting metrics and KPIs, for example asking to reduce the number and length of calls into the call centre while increasing inbound up-sell revenue. The purpose is to empower employees and not tie them up in a web of confusing measures.
Culture: This is perhaps the hardest element to get right as it involves a genuine embracement of the philosophy that drives the strategy associated metrics and in effect “living the brand.” A great example of a leader that affected this kind of change is Jack Welch, former CEO of General Electric. He created a cultural shift by (1) Freeing managers to manage – and rise; (2) Defeating bureaucracy and rigidity; (3) Generating and using new ideas; (4) Empowering workers to flourish and grow. In the UK, Telefonica O2 talks about “fandom” as starting with the employee: if you can get your employees to be fans of the business, customers will naturally follow suit.
What’s in a Name?
Choosing a metric naming convention that is relevant to everyone and easy to understand throughout the whole organisation can make a huge difference. It may seem trivial but if employees are unfamiliar with an academic concept, it can have an alienating effect, with a sense that it’s been imposed by senior management.
A great example of this is The Carphone Warehouse. They took an open-source methodology which suggests that asking a customer’s willingness to recommend them to their friends and colleagues is a critical predictor of future business performance. Carphone branding this metric in a way that at all their employees understand, namely “World-Class Service Score (WCSS).” All of Carphone’s employees know that the extent to which they deliver world-class service will have a positive effect on their bonus. They use the WCSS term in their everyday language and have truly embraced the metric and what it means both to them and to the business.
In summary, no metric or KPI will have a significant impact on a company’s performance unless it is effectively owned by all levels of the organisation, and three key elements of ownership are (1) showing clear commitment; (2) driving consistent behaviour and (3) infusing the metric into the company culture.
In the second part of this Customer Engagement Report, we’ll cover six key stages in Operational Integration.
