The last mile: "Customer Centricity"

For many young companies the first sign of success and confidence is "sales traction". Successful companies turn sales traction into customer satisfaction. As companies mature (or experience exponential growth as we are) they need to swiftly become customer-centric and deliver on the promises made by the sales and marketing teams. 

The connection I made from the quotes excerpted below (from a long blog post by Maz IqBal), struck me as very consistent with the biggest challenge and opportunity – To provide the type of insight and knowledge to our clients that will influence their success and behavior:

 “No matter how good you look, no matter how good you’ve gotten your family to look, and no matter how much wealth, fame or power you have amassed, (you will at some point) experience a profound lack of fulfillment….. expressed by the commonly asked question: Is This All There Is? Dealing with the crisis of “Is this all there is?” lies in having a commitment to the realization of future (a cause) that leaves you with a passion for living… 

...A point about discipline, about sticking to one’s stand. Why does this matter? Because we swim in a culture that is about ease, convenience, comfort, finding the short-cut and focusing on the short-term...You might be wondering why I have dived into leadership given that this is The Customer Blog. Because the move to customer-centricity requires leaders to show up as leaders and exercise leadership… And without this kind of leadership organizations can talk as much as they like, put in as much technology as they like, redesign processes etc and they will still not show up as customer-centric as experienced by the customer.  

The shift to customer-centricity requires a genuine shift to being a company that stands for creating superior value for customers: enriching their lives, improving their welfare, helping them with the issues that they are grappling with… As such it requires a commitment to something bigger than one’s need to make the short-term numbers to collect the bonus cheques. It requires integrity – keeping one’s promises including those that customers can reasonably expect you to keep even if you have not explicitly promised that promise. And it requires authenticity.” 

Link to the post http://t.co/iK45BOZ1 - about the Author: Maz Iqbal - Dynamica Consulting Group: I define myself as a ‘customer based strategist’. My focus is on helping organizations to generate-define-design-execute customer based strategies that create superior value for customers and competitive advantage for the enterprise. You can access my thinking at The Customer Blog (www.thecustomerblog.co.uk).