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Many companies struggle to understand what it means to be a customer-centric organization. Although it’s a somewhat amorphous concept, the most common definition is “putting the customer at the center of everything we do.” This mindset frequently translates into new policies, procedures, and processes aimed at establishing more customer-centric operations. However, many of these efforts end in failure.
In fact, according to McKinsey, approximately 70% of customer-centric transformation initiatives fail. The cause is a lack of bottom-up support, not unclear instructions. Leaders consistently overlook the power of culture and its gravitational pull in fighting change.
A customer-centric culture cannot be achieved by mere agreements or mandates. Especially if it is only aimed at increasing sales or his earnings per share. These are just the results of fundamental behavioral changes. Unless employees, management, executives, and board members all agree on why a customer-centric culture is good business, you won’t be able to change behavior.
Successful customer-centric behavior change strategies start with understanding the context of change, or the patterns of influencing factors that shape how change is perceived and adopted within an organization. Although the context of change varies widely across organizations, leaders can benefit from being aware of their organization’s unique contexts and build more tailored strategies from there.
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For example, Company A perceives its organizational change landscape to be strong at tactical execution but weak at strategic thinking, with one particular team (information technology) historically being the most resistant to change. Suppose you have Additionally, you may decide that your sales team is an early adopter and is likely to have a strong impact on other departments.
Once the changing situation is defined, leaders must identify its positive and negative aspects. This is where obstacles and benefits can arise in implementing customer-centric change. This includes identifying behaviors, catalysts, and inhibitors of customer-centric change.
action Actions and behaviors that support or derail a customer-centric end state. catalyst From incentives to processes, positively influence these behaviors to help employees perform customer-centric activities more effectively. inhibitor Whether social, operational, or cultural, these include factors that create resistance to change.
Actions that align with customer-centric goals include ensuring that customer service team members stay on the phone to ensure customer issues are resolved, rather than trying to meet talk time metrics, and This may include having your employees send handwritten thank you cards to their assigned customers. Catalysts could include customer decision-making autonomy for individual departments and flexibility in customer satisfaction spending. Disincentives can range from rigid organizational structures, narrow compensation policies, and acerbic leadership of key teams.
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Once these cultural influences are fully mapped, leaders can develop strategies to leverage change agents to change mindsets, eliminate blockers, strengthen coordinated behavior, and introduce and model new behaviors. , allowing you to create customized interventions. These interventions need to be clearly articulated as part of a change philosophy that fits the organizational change context. Depending on the situation, interventions may include common elements such as restructuring organizational structures or introducing new systems and tools to streamline customer interactions.
In this situation, Company A can amplify beneficial behaviors by publicly highlighting employees who exhibit desired behaviors, recognize teams across the organization that generate new ideas that align with the customer-centric vision, and A range of behavioral and mindset interventions can be used, including restructuring the behavior. A social network that brings together different individuals and groups around mutually beneficial goals and ideas.
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When leaders broaden their view of the possibilities for change, they are better able to envision and utilize a greater variety of interventions. This can be supported through cross-industry research to identify relevant antecedents and creative interventions, rather than relying solely on individual experience.
Until new behaviors and ideas become ingrained in the organization’s social norms, they can deteriorate. The intervention increases employee engagement and increases their ability to accept and implement customer-centric changes.
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