What's the One Thing You'd Advise a CEO?

Gwynne Young
Managing Editor, CustomerThink
Member

Posted 05-Jan-2007 08:22 AM
For the first month of 2007, we've asked our gurus and other contributors to focus on advice to c-level executives. What would you tell them to do to improve their business' customer-centricity? we asked.

Kicking off the week, month and year, CustomerThink CEO Bob Thompson, in his article, Build a Customer-Centric CxO Team: CRM Resolutions for 2007 , offers "resolutions" for each CxO in an organization.

If you had one CxO and one piece of advice to offer that person to make a customer-centric strategy succeed in the organization, what would you say?

Cristene Gonzalez Wertz
Member
Picture of Cristene Gonzalez Wertz

Posted 15-Jan-2007 08:17 AM
The measure of success is not whether you have a customer experience strategy or even a suite of customer experiences defined. It is how effectively you can operationalize, measure and continue to track and improve those experiences at the personal level. The individual customer level. Not personalized, personal. The bridge bewteen strategy and execution is the one most often left unbuilt, or in a state of disrepair. This integration is needed—because the best tools won't work without effective strategy—and the best strategy is only words without effective operationalization.

Malcolm Wicks
Member

Posted 16-Jan-2007 02:57 AM
Never do to a customer anything that you would not want a supplier to do to you.

Graham Hill
Guru
Member

Posted 17-Jan-2007 11:06 PM
Gwynne,

Many C-level executives are out of touch with what life is like on the front-line and particularly, with what life is like as a customer.

So help them understand the cutting-edge of their company.

Encourage them to spend several days per month on the front-line—as an anonymous normal Joe, not as the CXO parachuted in with a brigade of middle managers to protect them from reality—talking to customers and more importantly, seeing what it is like to have to use their own company's processes & systems to resolve customer problems.

Customer Service, and in particular, complaints, would be a great place to start.

If C-level executives balk at doing this, then, perhaps they are not the sort of people a customer-centric company actually needs.

British Airways during its amazing customer-centric turnaround in the early 80s went through a difficult process of identifying senior managers who wouldn't hack it in the new customer-centric business model they were developing. In an infamous night of the long knives, 183 senior managers were fired and almost disappeared overnight. They were not simply dumped as so often happens today, but rather helped into other jobs at companies not facing the need to become customer-oriented. But the message was loud and clear to all staff. And it worked. British Airways went on to become the World's Favourite Airline.

Graham Hill
Independent CRM Consultant
Interim CRM Manager