In 2007, I had the privilege of delivering over 75 speeches around the world – all in the quest to help bring companies together to deliver a better customer experience.
What I learned is that in every part of the world, making this work happen is a challenge. The struggle still remains to connect the silos and get everyone on the same page – moving in a unified direction for customers. In Brazil, the challenges sounded uncannily the same (although much more beautifully sounding in their language) than the challenges I heard from audiences and clients in New Jersey and San Francisco.
With all of these audiences, what we talked about is where they are making traction in the customer crusade, how they are making that happen; and what still gets in the way of moving past lip service to action.
Here’s a review of the state of the crusade in 2007:
Optimism over Net Promoter
The reach of the Net Promoter concept and idea has taken-hold the world over. The simplicity of one “ultimate” question is compelling in. And it gives CEOs something to easily grasp and point to regarding a customer target. Those who have started to work through this concept have hit some walls, none of them insurmountable. I state them here to hopefully prevent you from hitting them:
- Don’t make Net Promoter just be about the “score.” If you do, all you are doing is replacing the old customer satisfaction survey for the Net Promoter survey.
- Don’t set arbitrary targets for how far you will improve. Especially don’t look out across all industries of Net Promoter scores and set yours. There are clear differences by industry. Don’t set yourself up with a goal that isn’t connected with your operation or customers. You’ll be revising and revising and revising…you get the picture.
- Create the back-end action loop that the Net Promoter concept success is based on. The whole idea behind this concept is to identify customers who love you (Promoters) and those who don’t (detractors) and to tickle out the issues causing both situations. You must have a process for getting to those customers and resolving those issues and then driving wholesale change through your operation to fix the problem for all customers. If this sounds a lot like hard work – it is. But just setting up a stretch target without the work process behind it will just have you treading water like you are now with the standard customer satisfaction survey approach.
Customer ‘Service” Gaining Traction – IF They Move from Underdog Position
I found myself face to face with quite a few customer service industry groups and conferences this past year. Those that are gaining traction have found a way to take the feedback that they receive from customers and create power in how they deliver it to the organization. Gone are the passed around excerpts of customer letters giving chapter and verse of how bad things are. In its place, they give the company hard, fast, real-time operational information.
With some simple manipulation, many of these fired up call centers now collect every piece of information customers volunteer to them on calls and in emails and on the web. And they trend it and bucket it by operational concern and issue. This knowledge is power. And it is propelling these organizations and leaders into strategy planning and partnerships with the operations throughout the company who crave the gold they are mining from customers. In moving from underdog to purveyor of information, these service operations are recasting their importance in the organization. And they are shifting their place in the food chain from just receiving what comes out the end (sorry) to also determining the priorities of the organization.
CEOs Waiting for the Grass Roots to Validate – Conflicted CEOs
In 2007, the customer seemed to have re-emerged as a priority on the strategic plans of CEOs around the world. I saw this first-hand as many of the largest corporations grappled with who should help the CEO make this commitment come to life. Leaders have been assigned to become what I call the “human duct tape" of the organization – to unify the silos in working together. Groups were formed to drum up ideas. All this is good. What happened next is the reality-check.
Out of much of this activity, we saw leaders embrace the ideas, agree that they were important – then lob them out into the silos and to the field to see what stuck. In theory, the idea of customer focus is agreed to, but in practice, in many cases it has been left to the different parts of the operation to decide how they’ll take action. Translated, this indicates that CEOs remain conflicted about driving hard the customer agenda from their office. Generally (and I mean, very generally) speaking, what we are in right now in this cycle of intense customer focus is the first stage. The "commitment" is stated, but the metrics, the motivation and rewards for behavior, and the mechanics of how the organization will work together to achieve different and better results for customers has not yet been addressed in many cases.
Silos = Customer Bermuda Triangle
It’s about the silos. This is one of the major sticking points to making traction. With every audience, inside every business, this comes up. It’s not the fact that the silos exist that’s the problem. It’s their lack of coordination and conflicting metrics. This is where leaders really do want the CEO to step up – to make it okay to work together – and to create unified metrics and new standards of performance that make people successful if they do so. Today it’s almost a renegade act in some cultures to work with someone else on a unified project because that work is not on anyone’s scorecard. And that’s exactly what needs to happen in this customer work. The silo management approach doesn’t work. Creating noise around this is occurring more and more among the customer crusaders, and they are taking a stronger stand about working on this first before taking on yet another set of (disappointing) projects that won’t gel because the silos don’t.
The Score Is Still King
Yes, and that is now happening for the Net Promoter score! For as much focus as there is on customers, the boldest declarations are still: “How far will you move the score?” There are two things troubling about this. First is that the customer initiatives continue to be led by the score versus a clear mantra for how the company will be there or change or improve the experience for the customer. What higher purpose a company has for its customers and how it will get there should be the motivating factor for doing this type of work. But the score still is the motivator. The second troubling thing that I continue to hear is that the scores that are selected are determined by external factors, such as competitive standing or where the company needs to be for the board to be happy. These scores continue to be set in a vacuum devoid of operational reality.
Comments