Believe it or not, McDonald’s has just added its FIRST “Customer Officer.” Whether you feel like this should have been done a long time ago or applaud them for realizing the customer is important enough to have an executive position, there are some key messages and learning’s we can get from this move.
I always start by asking “Why” to just about everything…it really helps get me to the core reasoning behind something. So I asked myself, “Why did McDonald’s choose to add a customer officer and why now?” Their head of marketing, Deborah Wahl, (who is new in the position after the departure of their top marketing officer) offered up a couple of comments on the topic of “why” in a recent interview from AdAge, “McDonald’s Names First VP-Customer Officer.”
She said, “Mr. Ehle will be focused on customer insights and enabling us to engage with our customers in a more powerful and relevant manner. Among his duties will be improving “McDonald’s overall customer experience and driving segment-driven customer experiences under the McDonald’s brand.”
This didn’t exist before? I find it fascinating that a company as big as McDonald’s didn’t feel the customer was important enough to have some type of officer focused on this pretty important element of their business…in fact the only element that gives them revenue. Either they didn’t think they needed it or they felt like they knew everything they needed to know about them to make decisions on their behalf. Guess what…they were wrong. In fact, one of the key reasons (it appears) that they added Mr. Ehle was because they have had declining sales and numbers of customers. And their new focus is going to be based on “segments” (another name for customers) rather than “products”…with a huge focus on millenials, which represents their largest growth segment.
There are 5 points I would offer up from this that any company can learn from…
- Move from a “reactive” posture to a “proactive” posture…don’t wait until something like declining sales triggers your need to become more customer centric
- Reconsider your “product centric” approach to your business and start thinking about a “customer centric” approach
- Listen to your customers constantly…they are always talking (with others or on social channels) but are you always listening…there is a gold mine of information in these conversations
- Reprioritize your list of what to do to grow your company…put the customer first and let the rest of it support the customer
- Design a “customer experience” that is “over the top” so your customer actually sees how much you care about them…anything less will be ignored
From my 20 years of working with companies to help them understand the incredible value of the customer experience and why it is so important to become more customer centric, the above list is something very few organizations do today. And if you’re honest with yourself as a leader, you probably don’t do these either. That means you have an incredible OPPORTUNITY in front of you today…your choice is whether you take advantage of it now or wait until the sky is falling in like McDonald’s.
