"We want to gain 5% more of the market share over the next 2 years.”
“We want to reduce our operating costs by 10%.”
“We want to be the first choice for customers.”
These kinds of ‘winning aspirations’ are a dime-a-dozen, and when you get right down to it, they’re often not that unique to your organisational culture, purpose, or brand. This isn’t to say that all business goals need to look unique as if you’re changing a few words around to avoid being accused of plagiarism by your teacher, but they shouldn’t be so self-centred either in ignoring the underlying reasons why your organisation is where it’s at today.
Because of course everyone wants to gain more of the market share.
Because of course everyone wants to lower their costs.
Because of course everyone wants to be the first choice for customers.
So where’s the differentiation on this? What will customers tell their friends about? How do you prioristise what to improve?
It comes down to the focusing more on the quality of your customer experience and the value that they feel like they’re receiving. Work on this, and you’ll see those returns you’re after.
As an introspective example as me the personal consumer, I’ve had the same mobile service provider for years now because there’s one flat fee per month and it gets debited from my account automatically. My service is consistent anywhere I routinely go. I get more than enough data and it also rolls over so I never worry about running out. And, in that rare instance where I need to ask a question or top up my balance, I know that there’s an easy-to-use app right there at my fingertips. There’s nothing more I need from my service provider as they’ve mitigated each and every one of my everyday mobile concerns outside of how my particular phone behaves, so there’s no reason for me to go looking elsewhere - I’m content. I can rely on them, so they can rely on me.
Now, I don’t know what my their goals are or what decisions they had to make to provide the level of great service that I, as their customer, perceive. However, what I do see is more and more organisations jumping on the feel-good bandwagon to call themselves “customer-first”, yet when you look at what objectives are coming from the top down, the sentiment you hear doesn’t align with what’s on paper.
I’ve been reading a lot on the matter over the past few months so I can’t give more specific credit as to what led my mind to where it is today (outside of the two article or thread links in this post). All the same, what struck me today were some food-for-thought tests in determining if you're truly working in a customer-centric organisation:
Are your organisation's top-down objectives actually written around helping customers achieve some targeted outcome instead of the business's own goals/aspirations?
If the key objectives are focused on business and market improvements, are there clear explanations and pathways showing how accomplishing those objectives will also improve the customer experience overall or in specific ways?
I’ve long been an advocate for speaking the business’s language in building a culture around user research, however, I see this mindset as the step beyond showing how the design process will increase revenue or decrease costs in some form or another. What I’m asking now is the “So what?”
What are we doing with that? So what that we’ve increased our revenue … are we reinvesting that in making more frictionless interactions? After saving hours of effort through simplying some internal process are we using that freed up time to better engage our customers to build a sense of trust and awareness of their needs? What are we doing with these balance sheet to operational business improvements we’ve made?
Now, if these particlar customer-centricity 'tests' fail, don't give up hope or run to your leaders waving a flag of failure and hypocrisy. Instead, think of what can you do today to start changing that conversation around what you’re all working towards. Instead of coming up with more problems, propose some OKRs that address customer needs or opportunities as shining star the whole organisation (or at least your team) can shoot for.
Get the ball rolling in the right direction towards providing customer value by defining what that might look like so the organisation can determine the how rather than aiming for the rewards you want to reap and asking people to make up ways to get there.