In an ever-evolving business landscape, one thing remains certain: the customer is at the heart of every successful enterprise. Your customers are providing you with insights and data every day, so make sure to listen to them from start to finish in your transformation. As organisations strive to stay competitive and relevant in a fast-paced world, the need for large-scale, customer-centric transformation has never been more apparent. In achieving this, we believe there is one underlying principle that underpins customer-centric transformation:
Keep customers, rather than technology, at the centre of transformation
With this in mind, we recommend that you think of 4 key questions:
- How do you create a customer-centric mindset across the organisation?
- What do your customers want? What do they love? What do they want to change?
- What are the tools, technologies and capabilities you need to become customer-centric?
- How will your operating model evolve to become totally customer-centric?
Clarasys’ tried and tested customer-centric transformation programme framework (see below) allows us to pivot the depth of analysis and understanding for our clients, based on the maturity of the organisation. No two organisations are the same and as such, it is imperative to approach transformations with a level of flexibility that allows you to tailor your approach closely to the needs of the customer organisation.
Clarasys large-scale customer-centric transformation programmes framework
Our key belief and understanding is that any transformation is more than just people or technology. To maximise the effectiveness of the change and to ensure the longer-term benefits are realised and sustained, it is crucial you focus on the following aspects:
- Customer-oriented vision, values and standards
- Align your customer experience vision to your company vision, and underpin it with a clearly articulated set of goals, values, and behaviours.
- Understand the journeys and processes you put your customers through
- Design customer-centric customer and employee journeys using the Voice of the Customer.
- Orientate business processes and operating model to support the most valuable CX initiatives.
- Drive customer-centricity amongst your people
- Understand what drives your people and align it to customer-centricity within the new operating model.
- Understand the gap in capability and plan to grow/recruit people. You can go a step further by incentivising and recognising those that use a customer-centric approach!
- Utilise technology with a focus on the customer
- Define the new capabilities both business and technology functions need for new experiences—and agree on the most critical outcomes and how to measure them.
- Use technology to enhance the value of your customer data. Use this to tailor and tweak your approach based on the customer insights you can generate.
- Can you incorporate technology into your customer recognition?
- Reporting
- Continuously track and monitor customer and employee engagement through scorecards with reporting dashboards & frameworks of specific KPIs
- Introduce additional reporting to recognise those in the business being more customer-centric (E.g. CSAT surveys aligned to engagement teams)
Focus phases on what matters most
In delivering a customer-centric transformation, it is important to work with your organisation to support, advise and challenge the most appropriate phasing of the programme roadmap. This becomes more crucial when you are delivering transformations on a large scale.
We recommend something similar to the following phasing:
- Customer needs – focus on the key priorities of your customers. What can’t they operate without?
- Customer wants – what do your customers prioritise? What have they told you they’d benefit from?
- Customer exceeds – how can you add value for customers in ways they hadn’t thought of? Use your customer data and insights to find opportunities to exceed their expectations.
To support our recommended phasing approach, there are a number of key questions and levers that need to be considered in the decision-making process in order to ensure the highest value approach is taken:
- Customer experience – how can you deliver a new or improved customer experience or journey? Define key customer personas, segments and a high-level desired journey. Put yourself in the shoes of your customers and understand where their priorities lie. Take this into your phasing approach to ensure customer-centricity.
- Cost vs benefit – how can you configure the phasing of the transformation with the highest customer impact at a reasonable cost?
- Time criticality – this goes beyond milestones. Are there higher priorities that can deliver value to your customers quicker?
- Complexity & impact – how complex is a phase in terms of impact on people/ customers, technical aspects and risk?
Working through these points of prioritisation can help to make sure you build a roadmap that delivers the best customer experience whilst balancing the scale of change for the organisation itself.
The customer perspective must be represented at board level
With your approach and phasing in place, governance for the transformation is the last piece of the puzzle to ensure a successful customer-centric transformation from the outset.
It would be naive to assume at this stage that your customer-centric approach and phasing has ticked all the boxes of a customer-centric transformation. Why set yourself up for success and allow your focus to veer off course? It is imperative that the voice of the customer is represented in your governance.
Your customer representation could come through a number of different forms:
- A rep who champions the voice of the customer
- An empty seat in the room to act as a reminder
- Your latest customer insights/data set to remind those in the room of the latest customer perspectives
Be creative with it! But make sure to keep the customer lens at the forefront of your governance, as without it, your business mindset may not always lead you down the correct path.
To learn more about how we can help you with a customer-centric transformation, please get in touch.
