Corporate Business Strategy

While Channel Partners are customers too, unlike the traditional customer, partners are able to provide a unique perspective. When it comes to Voice of Partner versus Voice of Customer survey research, consider these four differences:

1 - Many Channel Partners sell competing products and services giving them a unique perspective on what drives customer purchase decisions. Their input can help companies understand what causes a customer to purchase one product over another competing product.

2 - In a similar manner, OEMs can use partner input to understand what drives a partner to recommend one product over another.

3 - Many partners are combining an OEM's products with other products to deliver a complete solution. Having a better understanding of solution offerings, can be valuable input for the product group.

4 - Customers who purchase from a channel partner often go to the partner for support. Partners can provide a unique perspective on what is needed to support the indirect customer. This input can also be leveraged for serving the direct customer.

Corporate business strategy can benefit from insights provided by the channel. The partner perspective can be used to grow market share, enhance the product roadmap, and deliver an experience that both direct and indirect customers value.

If you are working to create a customer focused leadership position, consider including the perspective from all customer types.

Photo credit: stevendepolo

I was recently with a business strategist from a Fortune 500 company who stated there were ultimately three reasons corporate strategies fail. Even though he was speaking of overarching corporate strategies, the three reasons align with what I have seen related to customer strategies:

1. You measure the wrong things – Good strategy is the result of careful, intelligent analysis; however, the old maxim “garbage in, garbage out” applies here. In customer strategy consulting, this can be the result of jumping on the bandwagon of the latest killer metric without a full analysis of whether or not the metric actually applies to your industry. One way to avoid this shortcoming would be to conduct a pre-program strategic assessment – this step will allow you to learn not only the key customer touchpoints, but also identify the critical needs of key stakeholders in the process. It will also help you make certain you are profiling the customers the right way and focusing on the most critical.
    
2. You make the wrong decisions – Even if you measure the right data, there is no guarantee you will make the right decisions. Some of this is related to the data itself – in customer strategy consulting, using statistical methods that allow us to determine which areas of focus will have the greatest impact on customer loyalty will provide some insulation against focusing on the wrong areas. There is, however, another source of potential error – and that is the direction of where the market in total is heading. Every decision is framed not only by the data you observe, but also by your outlook on the competitive environment in general. To ensure you get it right, there are three recommendations I would make:

• Include competitive assessments in your loyalty measurement program – Having an idea on your position relative to the competition can help fine-tune your analysis. You can read more about benchmarking options in this series.


• Commit to ongoing measurement – This does not necessarily mean an ongoing data collection effort; rather, it is about knowing when to re-assess the customer landscape to ensure you are accounting for all the relevant issues. Most clients do this every 18 to 24 months at a minimum.


• Build macro and micro-level strategic plans – The overall strategy that emerges from the statistical analysis is best used in the context of focal areas that have the greatest impact on the greatest number of customers; however, building more micro-level, customer-based action plans will ensure you are accounting for the individual differences that exist among customers.

3. You do not take action – This is the one we tend to see the most. I once worked with a person who was prone to saying “strategy is cheap; execution is hard.” When I first heard him say this, I thought he was saying that strategy was simple; I now realize what he meant was that even though strategy can be hard, it is infinitely more difficult to execute on a plan of attack you know is correct. The phenomenon of acting in ways that are not in your best interest is less about intelligence and more about discipline. I tend to use diet and exercise as an example – I know I should exercise more and eat less, but it is far easier to do the opposite. We at Walker have designed a framework to help navigate the key disciplinary elements needed to take action – namely, organization, process, communication, and motivation.

Certainly there are many reasons strategies can fail; however, I suspect that most of the reasons would fit into this framework. Being mindful of the potential pitfalls that may exist can help you be more proactive in building a plan that will maximize your probability of success.

Mark A. Ratekin
Sr. Vice President, Consulting Services

One common response from people who use customer insights to drive corporate business strategy goes something like this, "The customer comments are great. They are very helpful and valuable."

There are a lot of tools for analyzing unstructured data, but my nine year old daughter recently introduced me to one tool for displaying this type of data.

It is called Tagxedo and is similar to Wordle. But, with Tagxedo you can put the word clouds into different shapes and images.

This example is my blog displayed as a coffee cup.

While this text tool won't provide you with the rich natural language processing that is available in some text analytics software, it is a fun tool for visualizing the common words customers use when they talk about your products, services, and brand.

Launching a new voice of the customer initiative is a big undertaking. Unfortunately too many companies do just that – they launch! They charge into an initiative without taking the time to develop a thoughtful plan. Given the potential impact of a company’s customer engagement strategy and the importance of doing it right, it makes sense to conduct an assessment to consider all the elements that will be critical to the launch and implementation of a results-oriented program.

The following 11 key elements are the key factors to consider in a well-executed assessment.

1. Scope – The scale of this undertaking is understood and the necessary resources have been identified.
2. Readiness – The degree of organizational readiness has been assessed and it is understood what will be necessary to create buy-in for the initiative across the organization.
3. Alignment – There is a clear line of sight on how customer insights tie to business results.
4. Listening posts –The organization has determined how they will collect and integrate the most important information for making customer-focused decisions.
5. Stakeholders – The information needs of the organization have been assessed and it is understood how customer insights will be distributed and used across a variety of functional departments and customer-facing associates.
6. Education – Programs to drive awareness, understanding, and action have been identified to bring about the necessary corporate culture for customer-focused success.
7. Communication – Communication needs have been outlined to understand how the organization will drive internal awareness, deliver actionable reports, and communicate externally with customers.
8. Technology tools – Technology tools needed to facilitate the collection, analysis, and distribution of customer insights have been identified and it is understood how these tools will integrate with existing technology systems.
9. External resources – There is an understanding of what additional resources will be necessary for methodology, research, technology, training, and additional consulting.
10.  Metrics – The key metrics for the success for the company’s customer engagement strategy have been established.
11.  Roadmap – A detailed plan or roadmap has been developed that includes a timeline of activities and a breakdown of the necessary individuals to be involved in a practical, phased program.

Patrick Gibbons
Principal/SVP
Walker

Acting on the voice of the customer doesn’t (or shouldn’t) happen in just one department or one area of the company. I like to think of it in levels. For simplicity sake, here are three common levels where VoC action should be taking place:

CORPORATE – At the corporate level, action should be very strategic. Based on customer insights, action plans should address issues such as overall retention, forecasting future revenues, projecting attrition, and considering customer perceptions on topics such as brand reputation, ethics, market position, and how you stack up against the competition.

FUNCTIONAL – Action at the functional level action becomes more tactical and involves specific areas such as business units and key departments. This middle level is the most diverse of the three. It refers to all groups throughout your enterprise that can benefit from the voice of the customer. These include departments such as service, account management, sales, and product development, R & D, marketing, and many others. In each case customer strategists should provide each group the customer information they need to improve their specific operation. What’s more, they should implement a prioritization process to ensure the most important issues are escalated to require action.

CUSTOMER-FACING – This is when action takes place one customer at a time. This is most common in business-to-business organizations where action is critical at the account level. To effectively manage at the account level customers advocates must work closely with strategic account managers and sales managers so highly customized information is provided to their people and they are trained on how to use it to drive business with specific accounts. Action at this level should be focused on improving account relationships to boost retention and grow revenue.

Too often voice-of-the-customer strategies are focused on one area or one department. Or, companies may do a good job of acting on customer insights at one level, but they don’t fully leverage insights across the organization. Customer strategists are wise to occasionally take inventory to determine the areas where customer insights could provide a well needed boost.

Patrick Gibbons
Principal/SVP
Walker

• Technical Skill (for support and design)
• Capacity/Scalability The buyer company is not only growing and changing, but may also try out a new vendor with a small piece of business before ramping up the purchase.
• Competitive Pricing - the sum of vendor costs help keep the buyers competitive in their own markets
• Reputation/Brand counts, but often more as table stakes in B2B --  such as assuring financial stability, that the vendor stands by its work, etc.

In this blog, Harley Manning shares insights on what "separated the winners from the contenders" in Forrester's Voice of the Customer Awards. His advice: 

"If you're running a VoC program, please take the time to think through how you'll measure - and prove - your program's impact on your business and your customers - not because you want an award...but because it will crystallize your thinking about why you're listening to customers and how the insight you gain can create benefits for your organization."

In our experience, we have found six essentials for driving business impact through VoC programs. The two that align most closely with Harley's advice are Relevance and Alignment and Validation. 

Two characteristics that define world-class Relevance and Alignment include:

• Aligning your customer program to the strategies that support your overall corporate objectives. Once this alignment is understood, it will be easier to quantify the return your program is having on the business.
  
• Integrating customer insights into the daily responsibilities and processes. For example, engineers might have a hard time understanding how they can directly impact customer perceptions. However, if we tie the customer perception data with the internal metrics that are familiar to our engineers, it becomes relevant to their job and something with their control.

• Combining the unstructured data with the structured data, such as financial information, operational metrics, and customer survey responses allows an organization to prioritize the areas that drive customer behaviors. Without it, a company might be tempted to act on the loudest voice, which might not influence future purchase decisions.
• Most business decisions require evidence and validation before resources are allocated. Leveraging all sources of customer information builds confidence that the organization is dedicating resources wisely.
• The words customers use to describe a company, product, problem, or positive experience adds context and can be helpful in developing customer communications.

The message in a nutshell….

Newly published research suggests that advertising impacts an unlikely audience – the company’s employees. Creating a consistent culture within the organization, aligning advertising with the firm’s culture, and ensuring accuracy of the advertising messages will heighten the level of customer focus exhibited by employees; this, in turn, will yield greater financial returns for the firm. This research reinforces that firms should avoid the temptation to over-simplify the marketing tactics they employ. The key is optimization, which is a function of understanding the ROI each strategy or tactic has in total (and how each may impact other strategies in play).

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We at Walker frequently counsel clients that the drivers of customer acquisition, customer retention and customer defection are different and, therefore, require different strategies. Advertising, for example, is generally associated with customer acquisition efforts, while managing the customer experience tends to be associated with customer retention (or in the case when the experience is not managed properly, customer defection).

Some proponents of social media and word-of-mouth have lately been dismissive of the investments that companies make in advertising, suggesting that these funds would be better utilized in enhancing the customer experience (see this blog entry from Deborah Eastman of Satmetrix for one such example). Newly published research suggests – once again – that business is a complex series of relationships with many interconnections that cannot (or, at a minimum, should not) be reduced to a single theme, metric or focus.

Mary Wolfinbarger Celsi and Mary C. Gilly of California State University Long Beach and University of California, respectively, just published research that demonstrates an unlikely audience for advertising – the firm’s employees. Moreover, this research shows that advertising can be an effective tool in enhancing the customer experience – that is, it has application in both customer acquisition as well as customer retention. Consider the findings of this study:

1)      Employees with a stronger identification to their firm are more likely to think that the firm’s ads are accurate and that the ads align with their own value system;

2)      When employees perceive ads to be accurate in alignment with their values, they perceive the ads as being more effective;

3)      As an employee’s perception of ad effectiveness increases, so does his/her pride in the company;

4)      Higher employee pride leads to increased customer focus;

Of interest to me is the hierarchical nature of these relationships – each stage provides the undergirding to the next, culminating in increased customer focus (and if you have followed any of the Walker blogs for any period of time, you will know that we have proven – with statistical rigor - that increased customer focus maximizes the firm’s probability of financial success).

What does this mean for companies? I would suggest the following:

1)      Make certain your ad claims are accurate and that the tone of the ad is aligned with your corporate culture – Just as perceived accuracy and value alignment yield (ultimately) employee pride and higher customer focus, perceptions of inaccuracy and misalignment can prove damaging to employee pride and customer focus.

2)      Don’t forget to consider cultural fit in hiring (and firing) decisions – The company’s culture is one of the few sources of long-term sustainable competitive advantage – among other things, it is an intangible that cannot be easily replicated by competitors. This research suggests that the path toward increased customer focus starts with employees that are aligned with the firm’s culture and have bought into the direction of the company. With this in mind, seek ways to ensure that potential new hires will effectively fit in the culture, and swiftly deal with employees that do not. Conducting peer interviews with prospective hires is an effective way to help ensure that a candidate will be a good fit.

This also means, of course, that you may have to deal with a strong performer that fundamentally detracts from the culture. To me, this is one of the litmus tests of the strength of the firm’s management.

3)      Realize how much complexity exists (and embrace it) – The purpose of this blog is not to dispute the power of social media or recommendation/word-of-mouth.[1] Rather, this research is further evidence that business success cannot be reduced to a singular metric or tactic – that is, this research suggests that the notion of customer centricity is an overarching theme of the entire culture that has ancillary benefit beyond just the efforts to maximize customer retention.

What is the best way to deal with this? I would suggest from the ground up – start with the culture and build the company around that. In my last blog series, I reviewed an HBR article about Zappos. Part of Zappos’ success is based on the fact that entire company was built upon a framework of customer-centricity – and we should not underestimate the impact this has. Here’s why – it is immensely easier to decide what the company’s culture is going to be and then build it vs. re-engineering it. Re-engineering is not only time-consuming (and, many times, emotionally draining), but it is also costly – consider the impact of the cost of reorganizations, new branding campaigns, etc.

It will be interesting to see how the acquisition of Zappos by Amazon works in the long run – it is not uncommon for mergers and acquisitions to underperform, and we would hypothesize that this is a function of 1) not properly understanding the security/risk associated with the acquired customer base (I’ve written previously about this here), and 2) not fully appreciating the extent to which compatible cultures drive the success of integration (or, to the contrary, the extent to which incompatible cultures can undermine the merger’s success).

So, to summarize – build your processes from the outside/in, but build your culture from the inside/out.

So, is advertising relevant? This research suggests it is, as it can contribute to the firm’s efforts to engender a customer-focused culture. Wise marketers will seek to optimize the tactics they employ – this requires not only an understanding of the ROI of each tactic, but also the extent to which each inter-relates (and impacts) other initiatives. Regardless, a single tactic is unlikely to yield sustainable business results.

To those who suggest that we need only a single approach to business success, I am reminded of Abraham Maslow’s quote - "If the only tool you have is a hammer, you tend to see every problem as a nail."

How full is your toolbox?

Mark A. Ratekin
Sr. Vice President, Consulting Services & Resource Management

Source: Celsi, M., & Gilly, M. (2010). Employees as internal audience: how advertising affects employees’ customer focus. Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science, 38(4), 520-529. doi:10.1007/s11747-009-0173-x.

1. Intensifying pressures to improve marketing productivity: E.g., the continual drive toward cost-effective "one-to-one" marketing.
2. Increasing market diversity: You can't treat all customers or potential customers the same. Customer segments are becoming more numerous and more specialized in what they demand.
3. Intensifying competition: The barriers of entry are quite low in many markets and the ability to create vastly differentiated products is becoming harder.
4. Well-informed, demanding customers: Just look at how you shop for consumer electronics now versus 10 years ago.
5. Advances in technology: I believe this trend is actually increasing the importance of each of the previous trends. 

1. Change the culture. Create a culture where and all employees are "customer advocates" and believe true success comes from knowing the customer and gaining customers' loyalty. Anyone who has tried to change a culture knows how difficult this can be. So here are a few practical tips:
   
   1. Remember that cultural change follows from behavioral change
   2. Get senior management commitment to do things differently, not just a verbal commitment to the concept. Seeing senior management spending time with customers is a powerful signal to the company.
   3. Be persistent. The change won't happen over night. Don't let the initiative fall by the wayside as another corporate fad.
   4. Communicate intensely to overcome initial skepticism.
2. Create a horizontal organizational structure organized around customers instead of products. An initial step involves restructuring core functions like marketing, strategy, and human resources but should quickly move into key or strategic account management functions to have a more noticeable impact on customers.
3. Create a centralized repository for customer intelligence.
4. Focus processes on sustaining customer relationships instead of just efficient execution of transactions. This was a big learning for many companies when they begin moving customer support centers off-shore.
5. Include at least two or three key customer metrics in your corporate KPIs. I believe each of these metrics should either be stated in financial terms (like customer lifetime value) or have proven financial implications. These metrics are harder to get but are necessary to a customer-focused company.
6. Focus on continuous learning and improvement. Having a forum for sharing customer insights and success stories will continuously fuel your company's efforts to become more customer focused.

I think it is interesting that creating a Customer Experience Competency Center can help an organization accomplish nearly all of these strategies, and it definitely signals senior leaders' commitment to the transformation.

I hope this review has helped center some of you on this topic. There have been interesting new thoughts on these topics in recent years - like balanced centricity - and I hope to bring some of them to this forum in the near future.

Troy Powell, Ph.D.
VP, Statistical Solutions

Reference: Shah, Rust, Parasuraman, Staelin, and Day (2006). "The Path to Customer Centricity," Journal of Service Research. 9(2):113-124.
 
List of all posts in this series:

1. Re-centering on customer centricity
2. A broader orientation for being customer-focused
3. Characteristics of a customer-focused company
4. The focus of customer-focused companies
5. The moderation of customer focus

One of the challenges that any organization faces when deciding to implement a customer-centric strategy is one of high intent mixed with low discipline/follow-through. My colleague Phil Bounsall likens this to the various personalities you might see at the gym.

Chef Boyardee has recently launched an ad campaign in which they say that kids can get a full serving of vegetables in a bowl of their various products – ravioli, spaghetti, etc. The point they are making is that you can effectively “fool” your kids into eating their vegetables, since they like to eat ravioli. All questions of the veracity of their claims aside, the main point is that eating their product is a win-win.

How does this relate to customer-centricity? From our experience, we see four factors that help determine the success of a customer-centric strategy; one these, alignment with work processes, speaks to the notion that being customer centric is what we do, not one more thing to do. The key here is to understand which of your processes are getting in the way of maximizing customer focus and either eliminate them or re-tool them so that they align with the customer-centric strategy.

Like exercise and eating vegetables, being customer-centric makes logical sense – everyone knows this is good for you, but making it happen is much more difficult. To the extent that we align the strategy to how we do the work (and how we are rewarded) shifts the tide away from customer-centricity being a “flavor of the week” to a means of achieving our personal – as well as corporate - goals.

What barriers in your environment prevent your organization from becoming customer-centric?

Mark A. Ratekin
Sr. Vice President, Consulting Services & Resource Management

A recent Harvard Business Review article suggests a new management paradigm is developing. In “The Age of Customer Capitalism,” Roger Martin provides a brief history of management theory; simply put, Martin calls out two periods of managerial capitalism to date:

1)      Management Capitalism This period, which started in the early 1930’s, created the notion of professional management, prompted by the work of Adolf A. Berle and Gardiner C. Means, whose book The Modern Corporation and Private Property made the case for management that was separate from ownership of the firm. This work ushered in a period in which management became a valued discipline by creating processes and roles that help to fuel the economic growth of firms. It could be said that by creating the division of labor between owners (who are, ostensibly, more entrepreneurially-oriented and therefore more focused on the vision of the firm) and management (who are more oriented toward building systems and infrastructure that facilitates the realization of the vision), firms leveraged the unique skills of individuals in a way that was not only scalable, but also increased the probability of firm success.

2)      Shareholder Value Capitalism The second period emerged in the mid-1970’s, when Michael C. Jensen and William H. Meckling  suggested in their article “Theory of the Firm: Managerial Behavior, Agency Costs and Ownership Structure” that managers focused on their own financial well-being at the expense of the firm (and, therefore, shareholders). This work (along with other management-critical treatises such as The Peter Principle: Why Things Always Go Wrong, which posited that managers in a firm advance to their level of incompetence) created a skeptical view of management; Jensen and Meckling suggested that a better focus for the firm would be shareholder value maximization.

Professor Martin suggests that shareholder value capitalism is also a flawed theory, and provides some compelling evidence that the shareholder value paradigm did not pay off for shareholders (in short – between 1933 and 1976, when management capitalism was king, the S&P earned compounded annual returns of 7.6%; between 1977 and 2008, during which shareholder value capitalism has been in vogue, the S&P created compounded annual returns of 5.9%). Further, Martin argues that shareholder return cannot increase in perpetuity.

So, what is a firm to do? Martin suggests that the answer is Customer Value Capitalism – that is, the path to shareholder value creation comes by maximizing what we at Walker call customer loyalty. In Professor Martin’s words:

“…companies should seek to maximize customer satisfaction while ensuring that shareholders earn an acceptable risk-adjusted return on their equity.”[1]

Why can’t the firm focus on both customer value as well as shareholder value? Professor Martin provides two arguments. First, from the perspective of optimization theory, you can only maximize one variable while controlling for all other variables. While this is technically correct, the second reason cited is more compelling – shareholder value reflects the value stockholders place on the company’s future earnings, and it is impossible to any firm to continuously raise –and deliver on – expectations. If we assume that customers are the source of all future earnings, then logic would suggest that maximizing customer value would be the best way in which to maximize shareholder return in the long run.

Do the data bear this out? Professor Martin provides some anecdotal examples in support of customer capitalism; we can add several more from our work with clients (many of which we have previously discussed in this blog - see this entry and this entry for more information):

1)      We continue to see a statistical connection between what customers say they will do and what they actually do;

2)      We have witnessed the correlation between a customer’s loyalty and his/her revenue growth rate, profitability, willingness to buy across a firm’s multiple categories, etc.

3)      The Walker Index, a composite of Walker’s publicly-traded customers, continues to outpace the broader market indices in total (see this entry for more discussion on the Walker Index);

In addition, the academic literature provides analysis consistent with what we see in our client work.

However, the notion of Customer Capitalism is another example of easy strategy that is extremely hard to execute. In my next blog, I’ll look at some of things firms should be mindful of – and prepared to do – if they aspire to adopt the strategy of Customer Capitalism. In the meantime, what do you think – what has worked in your firm (or what have you witnessed as a best practice among firms, brands, or products that you use)?

Mark A. Ratekin
Sr. Vice President, Consulting Services & Resource Management

• We will understand where we have financial security (and risk) in our customer base.
• We will understand who our most valuable customers are.
• We will understand what potential revenue gains exist among our current customers.

• Changing economic conditions;
• Regulatory changes in your market;
• Competitive forces – new entrants, exiting competitors, supplier influences, resource constraints, etc.
• Changing consumer tastes; We recommend taking a fresh look at your program every couple of years to see how things are changing in your environment (and we need to revamp in the program to keep it fresh, relevant, and impactful).

• How do we define an account – one person or many people? One customer organization or entities within that organization?
• Should our sample mirror our revenue composition? If so, do we weight results, control the sample, or both?
• Do we have access to (and can identify) all relevant customer contacts? Should we differentiate by decision role, for example?

In a presentation I did at Walker’s most recent User Forum, I included some references to a book called The Art of Engagement by Jim Haudan, the CEO of Root Learning. I enjoyed this book primarily because of its basic premise: creating a strategy is far easier than executing it. The reason? Most organizations don’t know how to bridge the canyons that exist between key groups of people within a company: executives (the top), managers (the middle), and front-line employees (the face-to-face customers).

Similarly, creating an action plan based on customer feedback is the easy part. It is much more challenging to engage the required parts of the organization (corporate, functional, and account-level) in implementing the actions. So, as the book points out, to succeed one must bridge the gap(s) between the people and the possibilities.

Haudan talks about what it means to be truly “engaged” and introduces the concept of the disengagement canyon, which is formed when people:

·         Are overwhelmed

·         Don’t “get it”

·         Are scared

·         Don’t see the big picture

·         Don’t feel ownership

·         Don’t see their leaders facing reality

He uses some great stories to make his points, including scenes from movies, common high school experiences, and the old “You can lead a horse to water…” saying.

The “Art” part of the book’s title refers to a unique technique shown throughout the book of bringing people to a common way of visualizing a challenge (actual hand-drawn pictures that map out what you’re trying to do).

The last nugget I’ll share are three steps in a strategic engagement process. These are:

1)      Creating a Line of Sight

2)      Connecting Goals

3)      Developing Capabilities

My favorite example here comes from the step about creating a line of sight – it’s critical to ensure that people are all interpreting something the same way. Take a common spoken word like “bear” – surely everyone would understand that. When asked what the word means to them, responses included variations like polar, grizzly, teddy, panda; but also deviations like Chicago, market, naked, and the biggest surprise – aspirin! The point is obvious, if there’s a lack of clarity around a simple word like bear, imagine the differences in interpretation that would arise from common business challenges like a “growth-based culture” or “world-class customer listening.”

So if you get a chance, pick this book up and give it a read. Then, let me know your biggest take-away and how you apply it to strategic account management or customer listening.

Brad Linville

Sr. VP, Strategic Accounts

Walker Information

What is the primary difference between your company and the global market leader in your industry?  If you are, in fact, the global market leader in your industry, what separates you from all those that are gunning for you?  I’m sure there are a variety of thoughts and opinions and debatable responses to these stated questions, but one thing will hold true regardless, if you aren’t linking the voice of your customer into your primary business objectives, you are not one of those on top.  What separates those companies from the rest of the pack?

They get it. 

They understand the basic fundamentals and the complex execution & analysis needed to become global powerhouses, industry leaders, organizations that exemplify greatness.

In my line of work, I meet regularly with corporations that create, support and sell products and services that, many times, you and I are very familiar with as consumers, some of their products/services are used by us, our employer, our family, friends, competitors, colleagues, etc. on a daily basis.  These are usually companies with customer-focused leadership, impressive market share and very clear customer related growth objectives in mind.  The companies I speak with usually realize there is an issue, a serious issue that is impacting the overall shareholder value of their organization and at the end of the day; they separate themselves from each other by those who execute and those who don’t see the sense of urgency around the matter.

That leads to the general point of this blog – How can organizations NOT put a sense of urgency around analyzing the voice of their customer and expect to achieve the greatness that so few corporations ever make it to?  I’m talking about the elite group that all others strive to be like.  I wonder if it is related to…

• We can’t get out of our own way
• We have issues with execution
• We change our strategies like the weather
• We are too big and bureaucratic to move with any nimbleness and effectiveness

I challenge you to share your perspective on what causes this “bottleneck” in the good to great process.  I have no expectation of these thoughts changing anyone’s perspective and my guess is that most will read this and think “Man, I’m glad that’s not us!” But know that if you made it to this point in the blog, one of three things has just occurred:

1. You realize that you are fortunate enough to be part of one of these elite organizations that has a true understanding of the impact of your customer on your business.
2. You have just left the denial stage and reached the resentment/anger stage
3. You just just escaped the monotony of your life for 60 seconds.

Are your customers saying, “They get it," when they speak about your company? If not, you should probably get to that sometime tomorrow.

Thoughts?





Michael Good
Vice President
Walker Information