Lock sights on the new customer-centric agenda

Amazon aspires to be “Earth’s most customer-centric company”. Numerous mission statements are sprinkled with customer focus. Yet the brands we most admire are much more than customer-led. 

Being customer-centric once meant doing things for the sake of customers, rather than for the convenience of the provider. So a bank would open extra teller positions at lunchtime when demand is highest. But by that measure, any successful company is already customer-centric. The goalposts for true customer focus have clearly moved.

The natural response has been for brands to try to raise their game. They are using digital technologies to discover more about what customers are looking for and retooling their operations to be ever more agile.

But that response draws companies into repeating cycles of added investment and complexity, becoming more nuanced in customer responsiveness, without really changing the value proposition. Keeping up with the pack in this way is essential, but getting ahead is extremely difficult.

To avoid these cycles, brands need a way of working smarter, not harder.

Defining the new customer-centric

So what defines the new customer-centric? One hint is hidden in the Net Promoter Score (NPS) metric that so many companies are now using. Although it was billed as ‘the one number you need’, the NPS is actually a mix of two numbers – the promoters who advocate for your brand and the detractors who complain about it. The two have different dynamics. It often turns out that the operational improvements you take to satisfy customers and reduce detractors won’t increase the promoters. If you want to work on NPS from both ends, you need a strategy to increase promoters as well as the operational efforts to reduce detractors.

That’s the new customercentric agenda – and it’s about more than operational excellence, ‘fixing the basics’ and listening and responding to customers. It’s about designing signature experiences that not only work brilliantly for the customer, but also bring out what makes your brand special.

Why did Virgin Atlantic put its signature bar in the Upper Class cabin? Not because customers asked for one. Why get up when they’ll bring a drink to your seat? It built the bar because the company had made the effort to build a great cabin crew and realised that customers didn’t get to talk to them. The bar provides that opportunity, which customers have been keen to take up ever since. Virgin’s Upper Class Wing at Heathrow builds on the same idea. It’s more than a curbside check-in – it’s an orchestrated entrance in which you are received, and led, by an airline host.

And while every brand is different, there are common threads that can lead us to a new definition of customercentricity. Three areas are key:

1) Customer needs: What do your customers value and respond to? Are you helping them to navigate the hassles they face today and also fulfilling their higher-order needs?

2) Brand story: What do you want your brand to be known for? What makes it authentic? What does it want to be and do?

3) Operational advantage: What is your company inherently good at? How does it make money differently from its peers? Being customer-centric requires making the connection between all three, which is usually a cross-functional challenge – and often crosscultural as well. For instance, when the executives at Virgin Atlantic conceived its on-board bar and Upper Class Wing, they benefited from a set of ‘strategic development groups’ with teams of managers from throughout the company. The involvement of human resources and operations wasn’t an afterthought – it was built in  from the start.

Balancing all three requires clarity about what makes you special: the unique personality your brand brings to different experiences. Without this, trying to be customer-centric can be like a trip to a salad bar. It’s tempting to pick each of your favourite ingredients, but while each may taste great individually, they probably don’t make a great salad together. Tocreate an experience that works as a whole, companies need to establish guiding principles that inform each of the individual design decisions.

Creating a Customer-centric culture

Orange, the Paris-based multinational telecoms operator, has a strong and well-defined brand. Its human friendliness and straightforward openness are well expressed in marketing
communications. But how should this personality manifest itself on the front line when a customer calls in with a billing problem?

When a distressed customer is unwilling or unable to pay a surprise $2000 bill for roaming charges during a three-day trip to Spain? What is not just a good response, but an Orange response?

To answer these questions, Orange customer experience staff explored different real-life scenarios to tease out the good, and distinctively Orange, approaches. We helped them to explore a battery of great and true customer service stories from other sectors and identify those that best represented what Orange was about. All the stories provided great responses to real customer needs and the comparison helped to isolate distinctive Orange character and priorities.

Then we distilled simple customer relations principles, which have provided practical guidance themselves, and more broadly have established the consciousness about ‘good + Orange’ as two essential and complementary goals. Animated videos illustrating the principles help managers and staff to think differently about their role with customers. As the organisation has embraced the ‘good + Orange’ logic, the guides have been translated into multiple languages, as well as into internal practices for hiring and developing customerfacing staff. 

Customer-centricity in unexpected places

British Gas supplies energy to 12 million households in the UK. In an industry that’s mistrusted by customers and the media, and used as a punchbag by politicians, the company promised in 2012 to become simpler, fairer and more transparent.

How would customers see the difference? There are not many interactions with your energy supplier, making the bill a crucial communications tool. And British Gas mails out 43 million of them every year. A bill may seem too functional and uninspiring to provide a real expression of your brand. It’s just a demand for money, right? But what if it were designed around the questions that customers really have? What if customers begin to feel a real benefit from higher engagement – that they can actually understand and influence what’s going on? What if they start to feel like this big,largely invisible company is actually on their side?

We worked with British Gas to redesign its energy bill around five core customer questions: What do I owe? When do I have to pay? What if I have a problem? Can I save some money? And where do I go for help? Much of the content of the existing bill, accumulated over time, simply did not contribute to answering these questions. So out it went. And in came new content, particularly on saving money and energy – with British Gas taking a lead in familiarising customers with energy usage, how to track it and how to control it. The resulting bill is intuitive – and customers love it. But they never asked for it. As one customer tweeted: “Who’d have thought your gas bill would be an infographic?”

What do these examples have in common?

It’s the understanding that people’s connection with brands depends on mutual respect, admiration – even love. Seen in these human terms, customer-centricity is about not being arrogant and selfish. But equally, the point is not to be servile, but to be yourself. For some brands, that means being charming or witty; for others, caring and compassionate. The right answer is driven by your brand personality, as well as your operations.

Simon Glynn is senior partner and head of Lippincott EMEA Contact Simon via email: [email protected]. This article was taken from the June issue of Market Leader. Browse the archive here.