Introduction

In todays competitive market place there can be few organisations who do not desire to be
customer-focused, and even fewer who do not recognise how important employees are in
delivering this. The bad news is that still few are truly succeeding in creating a customer focus
culture where the customer is king. This focus upon the impact of the employee in building a
customer culture is becoming a key issue for those who want to maintain a competitive
advantage.

In this article the authors investigate the reasons for the gap between realisation of converting
customer strategy to culture, and delivering against it to create a customer oriented culture. They
also examine the steps that can be taken to bridge this void.

Organisational alignment
Most organisations have vision and or mission statements. Many also have values which
underpin these. However, few organisations:
1. base their values on customer feedback
2. involve their employees in the development of values
3. link these values to their brand
4. encourage their employees to align their behaviours to the values
5. reward their employees for living the brand
As a consequence organisational values such as honesty, teamwork, partnering, creativity
although espoused by businesses, become no more than empty words: meaningless to both the
customer and the employee. If this is the case, how can a company build culture change around
customers?

Heskitt et al have researched and developed the service-profit chain which shows the interconnectivity between internal and external service and profitability. Research is not new but
many organisations still do not recognise that employees need to live the brand promise in order
to both attract and retain profitable customers and create a customer culture.

Organisations such as Virgin, Nike and US retailer Nordstorm, have succeeded in creating strong
brands with powerful brand promises. Through listening to customer needs and via consultation
with employees they have been able to identify brand values which form the backbone of how
they do business with the customer and how employees are managed in short they create a
customer focus culture that realises the customer vision.

Top team clarity

The inside out and believing that the customer is king concept starts at the top of the
organisation. Employees look to the top team to model the desired behaviours in all areas and in
creating a customer focus culture no less. The authors have worked with many Boards who have
encouraged employees to live the brand. Yet their own behaviour has been far from consistent
with the desired brand values. Little wonder that the values are not adopted on a wide spread
basis and converting customer strategy to customer culture remains a pipe dream.
Organisations such as Barclays and AT&T have developed leadership behaviours and employee
competencies which directly reflect brand values. These in turn are linked to customer needs and
are surely the only way to ensure that culture change around customers is successful.

Members of top teams need to regularly assess to what extent their behaviours in relation to
customer culture are aligned to the brand and the commitment to the customer vision. They need
to also encourage this process across the organisation if a truly customer oriented culture is to
emerge.
Feedback instruments such as 360 can help in identifying how well an individuals behaviours
match the desired organisational customer focus culture. 360 provides a fully rounded picture of
the perceptions of a persons behaviour based on manager, colleagues, customers and team
members feedback. Experience shows that in order to set a positive role model, leaders in the
business need to receive, act on and communicate the findings of their own 360. Round tables of
senior managers and staff as well as town hall meetings and open forums also encourage a
climate of openness and listening and genuinely converting customer strategy to a customer
focus culture.

Listen to employees
Many organisations do not place enough value on the insight their employees have into their
customers needs. Whether this is based upon day to day interactions or more formal business

reviews, this is an invaluable resource that should be fully utilised before contacting customers to
gather their views as it will provide an excellent framework of knowledge on which to build. This
is a key stage of ensuring employee engagement to help deliver a positive customer
exeperience.

Listen to customers both internal and external

Many companies today particularly in the service sector carry out some form of customer
satisfaction measurement. When it comes to budget setting, the vast majority of organisations
approve the budget for asking their customers for feedback on how they perceive the
organisations performance. However, very few companies develop budgets around what should
be done as a result of the survey findings. It is this lack of resources that prevents the vast
majority of companies successfully implementing countermeasures based around the customer
feedback and is the major reason for lack of service improvements and building culture change
around customers.
This problem is not caused by a lack of desire by companies to improve things for customers, but
a lack of alignment between a desire to listen to customers and their organisations customer
oriented culture. Although many companies do have a strategic vision of being customer
focused, or customer led they struggle to implement this through functional strategies such as
the Marketing and Customer Care strategies leading to a failure to implement a genuine
customer culture.

One of the trends over recent years has been to believe that the implementation of a Customer
Relationship Management (CRM) system will deliver the corporate vision in relation to building a
customer culture. Yet many CRM systems have failed to deliver why?
Findings on the progress of CRM programmes include:

CRM is a fantasy in most organisations . Over 60% of CRM projects end in some form
of failure Gartner Group

80% of all CRM initiatives fail, and provide no reasonable ROI vSente Consultancy

More than 90% of Meta clients are examining the financial justifications for CRM many
are taking a step back Meta Group

Fundamentally CRM is a software package that will manipulate data to provide one view of the
customer and further guidance on how to:

segment their customers

how to target their customers

how to package their products to the customer

how to sell their customer base

how to bill their customer

CRM does have some success with this, but the crucial element that gets overlooked with CRM,
is that on its own it does not help you understand your customer needs or build a customer
culture. It is always about what you as a supplier can do to your customers, and not what you
can do with or for your customers.. To be customer focused and to develop culture change
around customers you need to work in partnership with your customer and allow them to opt into
the relationship. Once customers have opted in, trust and co-operation can be developed which
in return brings mutual benefits. In addition for CRM to be successful employees need to buy-in
to the process and to want to make it work. Again, a high degree of trust and co-operation are
required here too if you want to be truly customer oriented.

Customer Journey Mapping

To further align the business with customer needs companies are increasingly using a tool
called Customer Journey Mapping. This helps identify the journey that the customer takes
through an organisation, often transferring from one organisational silo to another. If the business
is to become customer orientated the use of Customer Journey Mapping is key to understand
your customers experience from their viewpoint rather than examining it by internal organisation
silo.

Building trust
So how do you gain customers and employees trust and build a customer oriented culture? You
have to start with looking at what are the key elements of any relationship, and these are true for
both the customer / supplier and employee / employer relationship:

accessibility

responsiveness

kept informed

knowledgeable people

promptness

promises kept

follow up

no surprises

do it right first time

This list essentially provides a checklist for any customer or employee satisfaction measurement,
as only when you are performing well against these will your customer / employee start to trust
the relationship. The actual words of the questionnaire would be developed around talking to
both employees and customers to ensure that the questions are phrased in a way that is
meaningful to the customer, and actionable by the company.

Maximise the value of customer feedback

So what are companies doing today? Research by Customer Champions into companies across
Europe indicates that the vast majority are gaining customer feedback, but as the diagram below
illustrates, it is what happens after that data has been collected where the real challenges star