If you have followed me for any length of time, read what I write about, or heard me speak, you already know how passionate I am about OBSESSING OVER YOUR CUSTOMERS and how this is at the core of creating a REMARKABLE company. But what you might also have seen is that I talk about Customer Centricity. Often times I get asked if they are one in the same…the same message just dressed up in different terms. They’re not…
For the purposes of this post…allow me to give you a bit more depth on CUSTOMER CENTRICITY. My next post I will share the DIFFERENCES between this and CUSTOMER OBSESSION. They are markedly different in one primary way but in many other ways so while many might use the terms interchangeably, they aren’t the same internally to your employees or externally to your customers.
Customer Centricity is a term that was created some time ago…the history is difficult to pin down since many claim to have started talking about it as far back as the 1960s. But academia (Harvard and others) have taken up the term much more aggressively in the past several years to describe a different way of thinking about an organization. So while the historical timing and ownership is hard to pin down, the concept is pretty easy to understand…yet often difficult to implement…which makes it an awesome differentiator for companies that choose this path.
In a nutshell, Customer Centricity is simply creating everything in your organization with the customer at the center…every process, operation, interaction, and strategy. The customer is always “first” when any decision is made…answering the simple question, “How will this process, system, product/service or change affect our customers.” This allows the customer to be at the center of decision making as opposed to products or services. As we know, the Industrial Revolution was all about being “Product/Service Centric” where everything was about making more products in mass quantities and getting it distributed as efficiently as possible to customers.
Today companies are finding out that a “Product/Service Centric” company is becoming rapidly “commoditized” because of the low barrier to entry from world competition. In other words, competitors show up much faster and easier than ever before in history since we have a global economy and will undercut your price/terms/delivery or other elements in an instant…causing you to potentially lose your market share overnight. This is why virtually every product or service has felt much greater competitive pressures today than ever before in history and why everyone is feeling the threat of commoditization.
Customer Centricity has experienced a massive resurgence in recent years because of this ever present threat of commoditization. When prices are getting slashed, companies look to other means to keep prices stable and maintain customers. Some have chosen to seek the higher ground in the Tsunami of commoditization by being more about the customer and building in processes and systems to support them in ways they have never done before…being all about the customer.
At the heart of this “being all about the customer” is the CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE. If you don’t deliver a Customer Experience that rocks the customer and causes them to say, “WOW, you are awesome and I love interacting and buying from you,” you risk extinction in the world of commoditization. This is why companies are venturing out into the world of being all about the customer…CUSTOMER CENTRICITY. Unfortunately…or fortunately (depending on your perspective) this isn’t easy…in fact it takes a lot of focused work and commitment from the very top leadership team in the company. This is not a “nice to have” it is a “have to have” if you are going to be successful. This is always the first place I start when working with an organization…if the top person and their team aren’t committed 100% we don’t start because the probability of success goes down significantly.
This process of transforming your organization from “Product/Service Centric” to “Customer Centric” isn’t for the “non-committed” or even the “sort-of committed” because it takes focused work for a length of time…it isn’t easy…but if it was, everyone would do it and it wouldn’t be the HUGE DIFFERENTIATOR it is today. But for those that are willing to do the work and make the investment of time, money, and resources, it is an incredibly rewarding position to have in the market.
I’ll leave you with this today…CUSTOMER CENTRICITY is so much more powerful and dominating than being Product or Service Centric…it is not just for survival, it is for eclipsing your competition and setting yourself apart from them. It is a chance to stand out and stand alone in your customers eyes. Being all about the one audience that pays your company, your employees, and your stakeholders is never a bad thing…and never goes out of style.
There are examples throughout history of Customer Centric companies that dominated in their industries…many of them existed even before the Industrial Revolution when it became more about mass production and mass marketing. Their principles have not only been reborn, they have been scaled up and leveraged today so companies can get significantly more benefit and impact than ever existed before our Internet Revolution.
But this isn’t the end of this story…there is one more chapter that takes you even further than Customer Centricity…CUSTOMER OBSESSION. It is different and it is even more powerful in the market than Customer Centricity. I will save that thunder for my post tomorrow…
