Are you, like many others, trying to become more “customer centric”? If you look inside many corporate boardrooms these days, aside from stressing about next year’s budgets, the C-suite probably has a combination of the following words or phrases in or near the top priorities for the next year (or years):
- Innovation
- Digital strategy
- Customer Centricity
- Content Strategy
- Talent recruitment
Digital needs a customer centric orientation
In a recent Digital Transformation study commissioned by The Myndset (Minter Dial), surveying 300 top executives in the US, 77% of the respondents said that being customer centric was important to extremely important (7+ out of 10) to their digital strategy.
Digital’s impact on governance
The need for change is being breathed in to all manner of sectors, including even the non-profits, government and illicit organizations. Judging by the results of the Myndset Digital Transformation Study, however, digital has not provoked as much change as one might have imagined (considering its stated importance) in the way organizations operate or take decisions. In fact, 68% of those surveyed felt that digital has had a moderate/negligible (6 or lower) impact on company’s management and decision-making processes. I would tend to believe that many organizations have yet to wake up to the deeper, truer impact of digital. {Tweet this!}
Asking the tough questions
In good times, companies tend to forget to ask the hard questions. The risk, with a rosier economic outlook in certain countries, is that the harder questions will not surface enough. For others who still have not figured out their higher purpose, the quest for direction in a confused world will lead to overloading the limited resources (e.g. people) and taking, as a result, short-sighted shortcuts.
Each word or concept cited above brings with it new questions:
- How to spread innovation throughout the organization, beyond the product and services we are selling? {Tweet this!}
- How can digital serve the organization’s bigger strategy?
- How well do we know our customers throughout the organization? What key metrics will our customer centric organization measure? {Tweet this!}
- What authentic and powerful content will resonate with our employees as well as our customer base? Do we know how and why our content is being appreciated and shared?
- In terms of talent, are we looking for the right profiles? Are we recruiting great storytellers, data scientists and top programmers? {Tweet this!} What are we doing differently to retain this top talent?
Execution is strategic
Beyond the questions lie implementation. The challenge for senior leaders, who are too often far from the field and their customers, is to find a way to understand the real dynamics at the front (in stores, on phones, on social media pages…) and to find ways to activate an authentic and inspiring customer centric strategy. In the end of the day, ideas are great, but execution is strategic. {Tweet this!} Making your brand strategy come alive in the hearts and minds of your employees and customers is the real journey.
Are the proper questions being asked? What do you think? Happy to have some blowback!
