Igniting a Customer-Centric Culture
Posted by Vovici Blog on Mon, Apr 25, 2011
Paul Hagan (a principal analyst with Forrester), Nancy Porte (our VP of customer experience) and I recently collaborated on a Vovici webinar, “Igniting a Customer-Centric Culture”.
What is employee culture? Paul began by quoting Jeff Bezos, founder and CEO of Amazon: “Your brand is what people say about you when you are not in the room.” Paul has come up with a corollary: “Your culture is what your employees do when you’re not in the room.” Paul said:
Too often companies focus just on the culture of front-line employees. However, I am a strong believer that customer experience is everybody’s business and that often it is decisions and actions behind the scenes that sets front-line staff up for failure. So, when we think about culture, we apply it to all the employees in a company…and applaud efforts at companies like City National Bank that get security guards thinking about their role in customer experience and Southwest Airlines that get baggage handlers thinking about theirs.
Let’s face it: Culture is one of those squishy topics that people have a hard time getting their heads around in a business context. In order to clarify what’s meant by ‘culture’ and guide our research in this area, Forrester defines it thusly:
Customer-centric culture - A system of shared values and behaviors that focus employee activity on improving the customer experience.
Shared values means that employees understand and know what is important, in terms of customer experience. And furthermore, they act upon that shared understanding of importance in their day-to-day activities. What’s powerful about building culture is that it can act as a force to keep other employees in line – “you’re doing something contrary to what we value here.” Culture acts as an informal day-to-day training mechanism for new employees coming in. That power also makes it hard to change, because cultural norms and behaviors exist in companies today.
As we planned the webinar, Justin Corrado, our product marketing manager, provided the framing metaphor: if you want to start a fire (a customer-centric culture), you need heat (executive leadership), oxygen (the existing culture) and fuel (metrics).
Heat: Executive Leadership. Nancy reminded us of the important role that leadership plays. A pre-cursor to creating a customer-centric culture is the need to define a customer experience strategy. Customers want consistently excellent customer experiences, but bottom-up passion for providing great customer service only takes you so far: departments have competing objectives, metrics and motivations. To break these barriers, leaders need to demonstrate a clear strategic vision and implement customer experience programs that cut across many departments and challenge conventional wisdom. Too many organizations today are led primarily by one department: e.g., the product-focused company, the marketing juggernaut or the cost cutter. Where is the “Department of the Customer”? It’s an oxymoron, for customer centricity must suffuse all departments. The CE leader needs to bring the different teams together to best serve the customer.
Oxygen: Existing Culture. The second element is the current corporate culture. Paul said, “If strategy defines intentions, then culture drives actions.” He continued:
In thinking about how to change culture, it’s important to step back for a minute and ask, well, what kind of culture am I trying to change to? From the stated intentions, cultural work takes over to drive those intentions into the day-to-day actions of employees. Jennifer Chatman, in - “Leading by Leveraging Culture”, outlines three levers that drive culture: hiring, socialization, and rewards.
Hiring requires setting the criteria, identifying prospective employees who are a good fit for the culture and developing a selection process that favors such candidates over others. Once an employee is hired, socialization becomes key: how can customer experience professionals influence employees’ day-to-day behaviors and decision-making? CE professionals should primarily focus on onboarding and training, storytelling, and rituals and routines. Finally, CE pros need to design a rewards program that recognizes the right actions and attitudes. This rewards program should include the informal (such as collective celebrations) as well as the formal (compensation and promotion).
Fuel: Metrics. Finally, the fuel of the fire triangle is ongoing metrics. It takes a multi-year effort for a company to transition to customer-centricity, and customer metrics must become company metrics. There is no “ultimate” question; in fact, many metrics can co-exist. Sometimes the chosen metric is selected more for political reasons than for metrological reasons. Although only launched in 2007, Forrester’s CxPi has emerged as an important new index, correlating with loyalty behaviors and even with stock market performance. Cast a wide net and analyze existing metrics to determine which are the best fit for your industry and customer base.
Creating a customer-centric culture is a multi-year journey. To learn more, check out the recording of our webinar, “Igniting a Customer-Centric Culture”.