We’ve been talking about the rise of the customer, the power of the customer, customer-centricity, and customer experience for years now. As Jay Baer has noted, customer experience has essentially become a spectator sport. Research in Harvard Business Review has shown us that the value of good customer experience has now surpassed the value of brand itself:
Companies are often in a mad dash to hire customer experience experts, consultants, and others who can guide the way for them.
But as we attempt to enter this era of customer-centricity (which admittedly is a buzzword), it feels like many organizations are still falling short in execution. It’s almost like a corporate version of considering the gym on February 15 as opposed to January 1: you know it’s important, and you really should do it, but it just doesn’t seem to happen in the way you thought it could.
If we know customer experience drives growth but yet we often fall short in delivering that customer experience, what are the factors holding it back within organizations? Here are a few theories.
Corporate Culture
Unfortunately, even as the millennial generation supposedly brings a new set of focal points to the working world, many companies are still lip-servicing culture. For example, the Netflix Culture Document -- outlining their core values and ways of operating -- has 13 million SlideShare views and has been called “the most important document ever to come out of Silicon Valley” by Sheryl Sandberg. But even Patty McCord, who worked at Netflix then and helped write the document, has admitted that most companies approach the same idea and essentially just create a list of adjectives and nouns that will never be acted on.
If leaders are claiming that customers are super important but really just holing up and chasing the same revenue metrics/streams they’ve always looked towards, the rest of the organization will see that and eventually mirror it. If you want to compete on customer-centricity, you need to shift your culture to being customer-centric. That’s a lengthy process at many organizations.
Miscommunicated Core Values
This goes with the above point. Often, unfortunately, ‘core values’ are just a list of adjectives/nouns without a ton of meaning behind them. Many executives seem confused by something that Peter Drucker was discussing in the early 1970s: profits and share prices are the result of organizational actions. They are not the goal of organizational actions. The only goal is to have a product or service that benefits an end customer/user in some way; that, in turn, makes you the money. When you begin thinking the money is actually the goal, a lot of other concepts internally can become skewed.
Misaligned Brand Identity
In the various places I’ve worked, I’d say this tends to come from silo-by-silo management. Your end customers have no idea who manages Operations vs. who manages IT, and they honestly don’t care either. They want the product or service to be value-added for them. But internally in organizations, we often care deeply about our space, our area, our department, our silo, etc. The question of “who owns” a process/concept is often paramount. This can lead to bickering, in-fighting, and the sequestering of information across departments. When that happens, the final customer experience is disjointed and shoddy. How a customer interacts with you on their tablet device may be one way (because marketing or IT ran it) and how they interact in-store is totally different (because Operations “owns” that). Misaligned brand identity comes from chest-pounding and turf-defending internally, but it also moves us further from customer-centricity.
Short-Term Myopia
Most businesses -- and all the publicly-traded ones -- are taught and forced into thinking in very short-term spurts, i.e. quarterly returns. But, any focus on customer experience or customer-centricity is a long-term play, because it involves building out relationships and touch points. Because companies -- and their leadership -- aren’t used to thinking this way, customer experience can get tossed to the scrap heap within a year at some places. Why? “We’re not seeing the returns!” This is a similar problem to digital marketing, honestly. That, too, is about building relationships and trust -- but the bottom-line returns take time. You need to avoid short-term focus in order to see that, but that’s hard for many because of how traditional business culture is structured.
Unrealistic Expectations
This one is more on the customer side of the equation. Although we sometimes over-inflate social media usage statistics (only about 58 percent of America is even on Facebook, for example; that is a huge number, but it’s by no means everyone), the fact remains that social has given customers an immediate voice/complaint channel with brands and products. If a flight is delayed or an insurance company didn’t handle a claim well, the complaint is right there, out in the open -- and anyone else can come along and take note of it. This all may have led to unrealistic expectations from customers around what brands can actually deliver. Customers may be expecting too much customer-centricity, and that’s not good for the overall picture either.
What else would you add on this gap between “strategy” (“We are now a customer-focused business!”) and “execution” (customers actually feeling that way)? I’m sure I missed a few items of importance, so feel free to add some.