Customer Centric Business - You are the Chief Customer Advocate
Be a Customer Centric Business
The secret to success is being a customer centric business. Everything must start with the customer at the center and everything else hangs off that center. Being a customer centric business is not about focusing every day on profit, shareholders, the Board, debt obligations, the next acquisition. It is about focusing on the customer first, defining a strategy for them to be widely successful with your business and then deciding what tactical things you need to do to make that happen.
We have interviewed CEO’s and managers of companies and the Customer is sometimes never even mentioned in an hour dialogue. It gets even worse in big companies where everyone is so far away form the Customer that they lose sight of their role in the company and totally ignore the Customer.
Be a Customer Centric company.
Add a Role and Title to your current Role - The CCA.
We strongly believe at Compliance Ventures that CCA is a role that should be added to every CEO. This is not just another ‘title’, it is a role that is so important to your ongoing success. The role of the CCA is one that shouldn’t be taken lightly. It is a role that tells the World that you truly care about Customers and that it is the center of everything that you do. That should be the job of the CEO.
Adding the role forces you to put the customer at the center of everything. It is what being a Customer Centric company is about.
The Customer should be at the center of everything. However, we see time and time again, that CEO’s are focused on shareholders, share price, revenue growth, their bonus and keeping the Board happy. All those things are important, but they are not everything. The Customer has to play a seriously major role in whatever you do. The Customer is the center of the equation. Adding the role and the title to your role will force you to truly think about the Customer. It works - try it.
You know you are thinking about the customer when:
You ask yourself the question in every meeting, ‘What would a customer say about this’?
You think about the customer before releasing a new product, a price list, a contact template, a new process, changes to your support mechanism or changes in your executive team
You think about how the customer engages with you and at every touch point, you are asking yourself and your teams ‘does this make sense for the customer’?
You are looking at a acquisition and asking yourself ‘how will a customer et value out of this deal’?
You are working on a management change and thinking about ‘Would our major customer get along with this person’?
You are thinking about product strategy with your customer at the center of it.