CEO, Global Transform. Lead authority entrepreneurial C-suite leadership. Listed Global 100 CIO, 100 Women to Watch, CREA Global Award List.
In the hyper-connected and evolving digital landscape, businesses are increasingly recognizing that a narrow focus on technology can lead to divergence from customer-centricity. We have all been on the end of both good and bad customer experiences in highly technology-centred organizations.
While the concept of customer-centricity has been long established as a positive, the focus on technology can create both a positive and negative experience. Customer centricity is less of a new trend and more of a return to what remains central to a prosperous organization.
Often called upon in the entrepreneurial space, I understand the support that organizations require when they’re not sufficiently clear on their customer proposition. It is here where I recommend that organizations step back and link their customer proposition to their organizational purpose. Often, this involves support for organizations to achieve decisive market penetration in their sweet spot of value add.
Understanding Customer-Centricity In Technology And Operations
Customer-centricity in technology and operations goes beyond simply delivering products and services. It’s about meeting and exceeding customer expectations at every point in the journey. In today’s world, it requires a fundamental reset in culture for many organizations, remembering that technology is in service of the customer experience.
For today’s technology and operations executives and leaders, this requires a strength of mind in organizational leadership while bringing the function to work within an enterprise mindset. The extent of the culture reset must not be underestimated.
Strategies For Achieving Customer-CentricityCultural Transformation
When building a customer-centric culture with innovation and continuous improvement, technology and operational leaders must consider building soft skills of collaboration. Informing the teams of the market position and proposition will enable them to translate into on-the-ground action and understanding.
Breaking down silos of historic thought becomes central to new ways of working. The most effective teams build in reviews and retrospectives to ensure learnings are built upon and that new silos are not created.
Having worked on several industry-changing digitization projects, such as introducing online channels and transitioning from signatures to chip and pin, as well as implementing digital wallets and mobile person-to-person payments, I’ve come to appreciate the crucial role of cultural transformation.
I found that driving significant changes within the organization required identifying cultural catalysts who grasped current business practices while being willing to challenge norms in the evolving digital landscape. To accelerate this transition, I strongly advocated for establishing a ring-fenced “go-to” culture to propel the next stage of organizational digitization. This created a proactive culture while maintaining stability for business-as-usual operations.
Customer-Centric Design Thinking
Organizations that accelerate in this space also unlock design-based understanding to ensure the right operational model. Embedding design thinking principles into initiatives centers on emphasizing customer needs, creating innovative solutions and creating rapid prototypes that can build in iterative feedback.
Often, routine thinking blocks the freedom required to drive design-based thinking, necessitating cultural interventions to promote independence in crafting organizational solutions. Recognizing customer-centric leaders requires senior management to be actively involved on the ground to identify those with a genuine customer-focused mindset within the organization.
I’ve found that assembling naturally customer-centric individuals and simultaneously enhancing the organization’s skills in customer-centric design Thinking often serves as the catalyst that laissez-faire organizations lack.
Continuous Feedback And Reinforcement
Celebrating team-based success and customer-centered behaviors becomes a key part of reinforcing the go-to culture. Incorporating continuous customer feedback is a crucial component of this approach.
This can be done through a variety of mechanisms, from customer feedback groups to social media listening and contact center feedback. The most effective firms celebrate success publicly within team meetings and functional gatherings, being clear about the reason for the celebration in relation to meeting customer needs and enabling market success.
You can accelerate cultural understanding and feedback by initiating discussions with your teams about the pivotal role feedback plays in constructing customer-centric propositions bolstered by technology. Often, teams can have a negative perception of feedback, but by creating positive examples of how feedback grows the team and enhances customer understanding, the impact can be exponential.
Within an increasingly technology-serviced marketplace, there is a requirement to regroup around customer-centricity to ensure that the technology and operational models are adding value. By adopting a customer-centric culture and processes, organizations seize the opportunity to differentiate themselves.
This evolution is easier said than done, as breaking a process-based culture into one where customer-centricity is essential can often be daunting for employees. But the benefits are significant for those employees who invest in the right mindset.
Organizations that achieve this transformation often have a core group of leaders who excel as coaches, guiding employees through the transition and empowering them to drive organizational value in innovative ways.
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