“The holy trinity of retail customer obsession: price, selection, availability. “ – John Rossman
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It’s no secret that organizations today face unprecedented challenges and leaders, including marketing executives, are under pressure to deliver growth and think beyond the confines of their particular function. Jay Weiser from the Weiser Strategy Group, whose career in business strategy consulting has led him to work with top leaders across multiple industries, has seen businesses succeed and fail in their effort to keep pace. “With near-constant change and disruption, leaders and their organizations must recognize that stability is a relic of the past and what differentiated in the past isn’t adequate for the future,” he said. Here are ten concepts to help you think about cross-functional alignment and delivering an exceptional customer experience in your business:
Stability is dead. In a business landscape now characterized by constant change, companies and leaders who “wait for the dust to settle” will be left in that same dust by competitors. "Understanding context is key to change,” Weiser said. “Industries are being disrupted. Customers are now better informed than company salespeople. Competitors are more aggressive."
The future belongs to the nimble. “Companies who are prepared, ready, and able to act have a significant advantage over those who are not,” he noted. “They can bounce back from disruptions faster and pounce on opportunities quicker. Conversely, those who are not, often do not bounce back and miss opportunities.”
Dynamic stability is the key. Weiser calls “dynamic stability” the key to the future. “Flying a helicopter is a great example of dynamic stability,” he proposed. “Helicopter pilots maintain constant awareness of changes in the environment and actively and frequently adjust the controls to hover or fly to where they want.” Leaders and their organizations need the same capabilities to guide and manage their companies. “There is no other way to fly a helicopter successfully and the same goes for leading and managing a business into the future.”
Customer-centricity is now table stakes. "Even before it became trendy to talk about customer experience or customer engagement, many successful companies were already putting those concepts into practice,” observed Weiser. “While it used to be a differentiating choice, now it is a necessary requirement." Customers in the past put up with a lot of cost, inconvenience, and opacity in their buying choices. “Now, power has shifted to the customer,” he continued. “They know more and have more choices. Now it’s imperative that companies quickly resolve these business issues or face, possibly irreversible, consequences to their businesses. “
Your metrics might be holding you back. “A new CEO at a well-known national grocery chain recognized that the chain was not consistently delivering on their long-held and core brand promise of superior customer service,” Weiser recalled. “He quickly realized that one of their main metrics of success, items per labor-hour (a productivity/efficiency measure) disincentivized management from encouraging customer-centric behaviors and investing in customer service like training. De-emphasizing this metric and raising the importance of key customer service metrics helped them pull ahead of competition and achieve better than peer financial results.” It’s time to review how you are measuring your success and ensure that it aligns with the things upon which your customer is measuring your performance.
Tomorrow’s customer might not have a voice in your decision making processes today. “Organizations need to see and consider the need to change earlier, even if it puts some of their present business at risk,” he proposed. “One company I worked with had built a very successful company based on their website.” Salespeople and some leaders were asking for a mobile solution saying that is what customers will want. Management response was that current customers were using and valuing the desktop solution. “Our desktop solution is what makes the company money,” they said. “We don’t know how to do it on a mobile device.” In reality, the customer of the future might not have a seat at the table yet, but should and if they did they certainly don’t care much about how you make money today.
Talk is cheap. Alignment is hard. "Being aligned for or talking about customer-centricity is not enough,” Weiser claimed. “Functions like Marketing, Sales, IT, Finance, and HR need to collaborate and act in an integrated manner to successfully to improve customer experience, increase customer engagement, and drive growth and employee engagement and experience.” To be successful, strategy execution must be a team sport.
Functional excellence is the ball-hogging of business. Weiser recounted that recently too long a CMO at an executive team strategic planning session said his departmental goal is to “build a world-class marketing organization, recognized by the industry.” The CEO pounded the table and said in colorful language that he didn't care about building a world-class department or being recognized by the industry, but rather he wanted to know how the CMO and the marketing department was going to help him grow their business. This is true of any function. Prioritizing functional excellence can undermine overall customer centricity.
C-level leadership needs to coach a new game. "Watching cross-functional leadership mature is like watching children learning to play soccer,” he offered. “At first, they just are amazed at how far the ball goes when kicked. Then they start playing in parallel they all chase the ball.” Which in itself is an early form of alignment. “Then there is some role differentiation and ultimately the most successful teams are the ones that will play as a team, passing the ball and actively assisting each other.” This is accomplished because players learn not only how to play, but more importantly how and why to play together and to keep score. “Not by the number of points they score individually or minutes of playing time, but by how the team performs overall," he concluded.
Change has a cost, but it might be less than you think. "When considering whether to change, organizations need to ask themselves and seriously consider the risk and cost of doing nothing,” Weiser reminded. “Leaders most often over-estimate the cost or risk involved in changing and under-estimate or do not account for the impact of not changing." Whether the change is an adaptation of success metrics, a delegation of decision making, or a strategic pivot, consider the cost of grasping to the illusion of stability.
Achieving dynamic stability provides a chance for your organization to satisfy the customers of today and tomorrow and become the positive disruptor of the customer experience in your industry.
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This article was originally published on Forbes.com.
Whidbey Telecom is a 110-year old independent telecommunications company based in Langley, WA on Whidbey Island, which lies 30 miles north of Seattle between the Olympic Peninsula and the I-5 corridor of western Washington and forms the northern boundary of the Puget Sound. With 100 employees, the companies provides internet, security, video entertainment and phone services to over 10,000 businesses and residential customers, most who live in rural locations. The company’s success provides insights for niche market segmentation for other industries, brands and leaders looking to build deep and lasting relationships with their customers.
Chris McKnight has served as the chief marketing officer for Whidbey Telecom for several years, coming from a background in sales and marketing leadership for technology, advertising, finance and experience marketing agencies in Seattle, Los Angeles and New York. He knows about innovation and the telecom industry relies upon it. But in the niche segments, innovation must be relevant. “The company’s history and culture is a rich tradition of innovation and entrepreneurship,” McKnight recounts. “In 1908, we pioneered Whidbey Island’s first telephone service. In the 1960’s we were the first to put our lines underground to improve service quality – we get many wind storms – and in 2004, we were the first independent telecommunications company west of the Rocky Mountains to provide Internet service.”
However, innovation for its own sake doesn’t ensure customer satisfaction. Here McKnight relies on research. “Market segmentation and personas are incredibly important to our customer-centric approach,” he said. “We start at a high level with published lifestyle segmentation data that match our households and then it becomes more proprietary as we supplement the data set with information from focus groups, surveys, and user data.”
This affects how he thinks about his role at the company. “My mission as CMO is to know the market better than anyone else in the company and to be the voice of our customers. I'm only able to do that by having frequent and ongoing interactions with our customers in the field and taking on sales opportunities,” he said referencing his background in business development roles. “Account relationships can provide enormous insight and data into what customers need and want in support of the overall marketing strategy.”
Based on their unique knowledge of their customer, their approach to service is a departure from the mainstream. "Since 80% of the residents are over the age of 60 and fall into the late-adopter category, we play an extraordinary role in educating and helping our customers adopt and adapt to today’s rapidly changing technology environment,” he continued.
“We maintain a 24x7 tech support team, and we extend our support to topics that other companies do not like how to use your email, how to download an app on your iPhone, or how to connect your computer to WiFi,” he explained. “We also staff a team of 10 customer service representatives in our Customer Experience center, so customers can come in and talk to us about their services, pay their bills, and get advice on new technology for their homes.” There are niches within niches as well, within the elderly population. Those that are 70+ often have a child or caretaker that works with them on their Whidbey Telecom account. “We are often conferencing in a child that lives somewhere else in the world, with one of our customers, to make sure they are getting what they need.”
The service stories at Whidbey Telecom take on mythic proportion. “Once the installation team pulled over to help a car that looked like it had broken down on the side of the road, only to find out the person was having a heart attack and managed to save their life by driving them directly to the ER,” McKnight said. “Once the CEO, George Henny, was swimming at the gym when he overheard someone say the internet was down. Jumping out of the pool, he called tech support wrapped in a towel to get the issue resolved right away.” In the island community, these stories travel fast and help build the brand. “We are proud to provide free WiFi and high-speed fiber optic internet to the community center in Pt. Roberts, were 22 different community groups use the building and community with the rest of the world,” McKnight said.
To their customers, service is personal. To Whidbey Telecom, it’s good business. “Not everyone wants to be scaled and automated into a non-human customer experience. This is where premium products and services live, and they are a very profitable place to be and a really enjoyable place to build a career.”
McKnight says his customers have enriched his life in many ways. “On the surface, many are laid back retirees, but when you get to know them, you find out they've run major global corporations, fought legendary battles, and invented the things we now take for granted today,” he said. “I don't think we're doing a good enough job as a society of sharing their stories and passing on the knowledge they've spent their whole lives acquiring and I think it could make our lives a lot easier if we did.”
To date, three customers have baked McKnight cookies in his tenure at the company proving sweetly that small is big enough
This article was originally published on Forbes.com.
“Customers rarely buy what the business thinks they are selling.” - Peter Drucker
Life is an amazing teacher and in business, I have learned more richly from our customers than any other single group. Here are some of the lessons I have learned.
- “If something is hard for you to explain, it will be hard for others to understand.”
- “Understand how the customer makes money and how you help them make money and then the sale is yours.”
- “Leadership is as leadership does in front of a customer.”
- “Leadership is about making and keeping promises.”
- “Success in life and in business is about managing expectations.”
- “The customer is always right, according to their perspective. You won’t be successful convincing a customer they are wrong. You will only be successful changing their perspective…or having yours changed.”
- “Customer empathy is the start of any great innovation.”
- “No one cares about your program, product, or policy. They just want their problems solved.”
Nothing beats customer verbatims. Marketing teams might roll-up feedback from surveys. Sales teams may advocate for their accounts. But nothing is more powerful than the words (or video) of a customer talking about their experience. Find more ways to get that into the organization and your products will be better and your customers more loyal.
Potential customers will lie. They don’t mean to, but they can’t help themselves. Find a way to test customer behavior, not customer opinion. Then you will uncover the truth.