The term “obsession” doesn’t leave much middle ground — either it leads to something very good, or very bad. Every department is driven by some sort of obsession. Sadly, an unintended consequence of the ERP systems that companies have built over the past 25 years is that many managers have become obsessed with business processes and lost sight of the customer, whom they have come to view as a transaction. A customer, however, is a person, not a transaction.
The “moment” — the essence of IT
Customer obsession is about breaking down the transaction mentality and creating positive experiences. Customers have no regard for your business silos, and they’re getting increasingly skilled at maneuvering around them to get what they need. Every “moment” they interact with someone in your organization — whether or not it’s someone that you intend for them to interact with — counts toward, or against, your bottom line. At its essence, IT’s purpose is to ensure that every moment with a customer or potential customer increases engagement.
Engaged customers buy your products. Disengaged ones look for someone better to buy from. A recent Gallup poll asked customers of 500 global companies to rate their engagement with those companies — the global average was 20 percent. To quote Dana Carvey quoting George H.W. Bush: “That’s bad, that’s real bad.” Here’s how to make it better, and bring your engagement up to the 60-70 percent levels that companies like Apple, Amazon and Ritz Carlton enjoy:
1. All technology leads to the customer moment. Dispense with the idea of customer ownership. No one owns the customer — not your sales reps, marketing or ERP system. However, someone always owns that moment with the customer, for good or ill. You can’t predict when the moment will come, but you can bet that its outcome will affect the buying decision. Fail in that crucial moment, and your chances of engaging the customer are blunted.
The customer moment, therefore, ought to be the chief concern of the CIO, who in this communication age is increasingly becoming the gatekeeper to customer/employee interaction. Here’s a golden rule for tomorrow’s CIO: all infrastructure should be developed and iterated with the chief goal of making such moments count.
2. Exit narcissist mode, enter user experience mode. Narcissism is the opposite of customer obsession, and will repel, rather than engage your customers. We get out of narcissist mode by walking in our customer’s shoes, viewing the product, sales cycle and entire experience from their perspective.
As we’ve argued repeatedly in this blog, the new business and technology landscapes call for a “new IT” which emphasizes iteration over implementation, and values the user experience above all. Nowhere is this emphasis on the user experience more important than in those moments when your employees are interacting with your customers. Prior to each rollout, therefore, ask yourself: “How will this affect my customer’s experience? Will this help my employees answer their questions more quickly and thoroughly? Am I giving them access to the full arsenal of information that the company has on this particular customer so that they can make the most informed decisions?”
3. Leave the 20th Century. Outdated ideas need to be retired. Such is the case with customer segmentation, the practice of placing customers in demographic sales buckets, which fails to account for the clues people are leaving all over the digital landscape about themselves. Next gen marketers will be adept at picking up those clues and creating “personas,” or holistic views of the unique individuals that purchase their products… if, that is, IT provides the infrastructure to do so.
One of the U.S.’s largest food service solution providers, for example, has dispensed with the traditional transaction-based, segmented mentality in favor of a customer persona philosophy. They’re leveraging the full resources of their tech infrastructure to gain an in-depth, individual-centric understanding of their customers. The ultimate goal: provide a holistic view of not just the various clues their customers have left all over the web, but also the outcomes of every moment of engagement with any member of the organization. They’ve taken a page from consumer tech to accomplish this, leveraging a customized mobile app to enable more effective sales encounters.
4. Use mobile and social to tame the CRM beast. In many organizations CRM has morphed from its noble-intentioned purpose into a beast that devours salespeople’s time. If your salespeople are distracted from building customer relationships by manager reporting demands, you’ve got a problem which you may be able to eliminate with mobile technology.
As a case in point, the aforementioned food service provider is using an app that automates the process of identifying and chronicling which customer a sales rep visits, what time they visited etc., eliminating time-consuming reporting. Furthermore, voice-command technology makes it possible to input the details of their meetings into the CRM system by simply speaking into their mobile phone — no logging on, no typing, no forgetting of details.
Furthermore, social technology makes it possible to make this accessible across the entire organization. As I mentioned previously, these days you don’t get to pick where, when or with whom customer moments occur. IT’s gauntlet is to provide a social-enabled infrastructure that enables anyone interacting with a customer to access the full arsenal of the company’s customer information 24/7, irrespective of location.
