New book: So You Want To Be Customer-Centric?

For the past few years I've been quite active in the field of customer-centric marketing and management. I had the privilege of working with the likes of Philips, ING, Lexus, L'Oréal, Sanoma and many others on projects which touched every part of our globe.

Along the way I learned many things. But the most important thing I learned is that the journey to customer-centricity is the most rewarding but also the most challenging that any executive or company can undertake. It is rewarding because a truly customer-centric business grows faster and creates more profits than any of its competitors. It is challenging, because the desire to focus on the customer questions many existing corporate habits, beliefs and even industry orthodoxies.  

But as I tried to explain the rules of this game to my colleagues and customers, I struggled to find easy points of reference for them. Take a look on Google and you'll find hundreds of books, articles and presentations on the theory of customer-centricity. 

You'll find research models, academic frameworks and aspirational cases, usually referring to Apple, Zappos, Southwest airlines and Virgin. But you'll find very little about the practice of getting a business to become customer-centric. 

So I called up some of my friends at the above companies as well as Orange Business, C&A and the World Economic Forum, and I wrote the book I wanted to read. Short, to-the point and packed with practical suggestions from a guy who's been there. I'm proud to announce that the result So You Want To Be Customer Centric? is now available through Amazon, Barnes & Noble and an increasing number of other outlets (Click here for details).

But I'm even prouder to say that the book's message is starting a conversation. At Philips, Arne Van Wijdeven, Director Customer Experience and NPS has declared the book compulsory reading for the company's market customer experience leaders around the world. Satmetrix Systems apparently liked it enough to invite me to their London NPS Certification course as a guest speaker. More companies that I can't yet mention are also expressing their interest. And in the weeks running up to publication, requests have come in to discuss translated editions in Danish, Finnish, German and Spanish.

At a very personal level, this conversation is what the book is really all about. My personal mission is to do all I can to make the world more beautiful, happier and healthier. In a business context this translates in an objective to help make the world a more customer-friendly place. I know there are many people out there like me, and I want to reach out to them with the suggestions I've picked up, while learning from the knowledge they have acquired as well.

If you are one of these people, I invite you to go to Amazon and then join the reader's only group on Linkedin (titled: CustomerCentric). If we share what we know and act on this knowledge, we can all make a difference, one customer at a time.

Is Human Media the Next Frontier? A Chinese Case Study

By now, we all know that we live in a world in which word-of-mouth rules.  The recommendation of a friend or family member outweighs anything a brand may have to say for itself.  

As a result, marketers from around the world are racing to measure the degree in which their customers, and the market at large, is likely to recommend them.  And, more importantly, what they should do to be more liked in the social media space that is called my kitchen.

For this, various measures are used, of which my favourite is the Net Promoter® Score.  It not only measures the propensity of customers to recommend, but also links these insights to economic behaviour, competitive position and opportunities for operational improvement.  But ever since I discovered it in 2006, I’ve had this feeling that there was even more mileage to be gotten out of that famous question “How likely are you to recommend this brand … ?”.

A few weeks ago, Futurelab’s Shanghai associate Jan Van den Bergh proved that there was.  Together with two partners he has set up Holaba, China’s first brand recommendation platform. 

In line with Net Promoter® thinking, Holaba surveys an ever increasing group of Chinese netizens on the likelihood in which they are willing to recommend 5,000 different brands (50,000 products), as well as their reasons for doing so.  Combining this NPS®-data, with additional customer experience, shopping and popularity measures, allows them to create an ongoing picture of every brand’s recommendation power.

But more importantly, by offering brands to connect out to individual consumers which declare themselves to be promoters (or in China recommenders) Jan’s team has effectively created the first human media network in China.

How this will effectively be used by brands, the future will tell.  But the following two slides are already a nice illustration of the information this can generate.  It’s all still experimental, yet the direction is quite promising (for the full Holaba presentation scroll to the bottom of this post):

• The first slide gives an overview of the recommendation scores achieved by the top 18 social networking services in China, using the Net Promoter® methodology  (n = 1500 to 7500 per brand)
• The second one cross-correlates the propensity to recommend a given social media brand (Tencent) with the loyalty to other brands.  This opens up a world of opportunities for cross-promotions, multi-brand community development, etc.

Recommendation scores of social networking sites in China

Have you heard of other human media initiatives that operate at this scale?  If so, I’d be quite interested to hear about them.

Social Networks & Recommendation in China

Full disclosure: As is apparent from the article, Jan Van den Bergh is a Futurelab associate, which is a cause for bias.  Still, even if a complete stranger would have walked in with the same proposition, I dare say I would have reacted the same.

Trademark notice:  Net Promoter, NPS, and Net Promoter Score are trademarks of Satmetrix Systems, Inc., Bain & Company, and Fred Reichheld.

The People Side of Customer Centricity

I’m on a mission to help marketing catch up with the realities of today, and one of the areas I believe still requires some attention is the way businesses focus on their customers.  Or in modern day jargon, how far they are “customer centric”.  Sure, by now we know that focusing on the customer can help you grow sales, build loyalty and even get customers to recommend you to others.  There are even a growing number of people that deploy the Net Promoter Score or similar metrics as a tool to achieve just that.     

But while these numbers and theories can point you in the right direction, they do not change the way your company operates.  That needs to be done by the people in the business.  And marketers need to make sure they want to play ball too.  They need to make people in the business understand why it’s important to focus on the customer.  They need to be prepared to walk the customer talk.  Truly listen to the customer.  Change their habits and behaviours.  Even re-organise the business if that’s needed.

Management Centre Europe specialises in getting people to develop a customer-centric mindset (disclosure: MCE is a long standing Futurelab customer), and from working with them on a number of customer projects, I’ve learned that this bit of getting people to act is a completely different ball game.  In fact, at MCE they found that only companies that place equal value on the mindset of their people, stand a fighting chance.

But when it comes to the internal – people – aspects of customer-centricity, most marketers are no where to be found (nor – to be fair – are most other departments).  Still, for those who would like to take up the gauntlet of really making something happen in their business, I propose six attention areas which have been proven in other places, and they could work for you.

Attention area 1: Show them the money

No matter which way you look at it, businesses are about money.  Shareholders want returns.  Staff wants to be paid.  So marketers should start every conversation about customer centricity by talking about money, and the measurable profits the business can make by making customers “happy”.  Talking about the bonuses that can be earned by growing customer delight helps too.  After all, only if the leaders of the business and their staff clearly see what’s in it for them and for the company, will they consider changing their behaviour.

Attention area 2: Involve everyone

Customer centricity is not about graphs and PowerPoint presentations.  It is about having your people experience what customers are looking for.  Showing them why customer focus matters.  How their job, no matter how customer-remote, can have an impact.  That is why marketers must involve everyone in the business in the customer research conversations taking place.  And rather than prescribe the right behaviour, encourage them to formulate for themselves what being customer-centric means in their job.  You cannot script human behaviour anyway.

Attention area 3: Adapt the KPI’s

Getting the people in the business to understand the importance of customer centricity and what it means to their job is a start.  But if the KPI’s they face tell a different story, the initial enthusiasm will quickly disappear.  Efficiency measures can eliminate staff time to deal with the customer.  Cost controls can create bad profits.  Project priority sheets can lead people astray.  As a third – crucial - step marketers need to work with other stakeholders to review every KPI of the business.  Does it encourage people to do what is right?  Or does it get in the way?  Is it customer-centric, or is it customer-toxic?  After all, only when every KPI is aligned, will the people be able to put their intentions into practice.

Attention area 4: Back it with leadership support

Once people are willing to do what is right for the customer and have formulated a vision of how this applies to them, they need to be empowered to act.  This is where marketers need to encourage the leadership of the business to come into play.  They need to allocate resources to the right places, encourage the right behaviours and forgive well-intended mistakes.  They need to set the example by actively talking to customers, and doing what is right.  And when processes, habits or politics get in the way, they need to be decisive and clear that the customer centricity drive is not up for debate. 

Attention area 5: Break the silos

But even empowered employees can only achieve so much.  After all, customer feedback typically doesn’t fit the processes and silos of the business.  That is why – even though they should advocate it -  customer centricity should not become the responsibility of the marketing or any other department.  Instead, cross-functional teams should be created and resourced to understand what being customer centric means across departments.  And subsequently align individual parts of the organisation so they "deliver what is right for the customer and for the business."

Attention area 6: Focus on mindset and completion

Any customer feedback system is a rear view mirror for your business.  It can tell you how well the business has done and trigger improvement projects, but it cannot predict the future. Every new situation will be different.  Marketers need to help all employees and subcontractors instinctively select the right actions.  For this they should rely on the customer facts, but above all on a mindset in which they know what matters most, and are free to do this.

So what do you think.  Am I crazy?

Change Marketing, Yes We Can (presentation)

I don't know about you, but for years now I've had the feeling there's something wrong in the land of marketing.  After all, we all read that the world has changed. That media consumption has changed.  Consumer behaviour has evolved.  That brands aren't trusted.  That mass media are dead. 

But at the same time the basic principles of marketing as I learned them in business school have remained the same.  While the media have changed, the majority of marketing initiatives are still about "shouting and selling" rather than actually engaging with a customer and gaining his respect.

I believe this has to stop and that is why – today – in Helsinki I gave a presentation which called upon the marketers in the room to stop the madness. 

To stop talking about what the brand wanted to say, and start focusing on what we, the customers wanted to hear.  To stop shouting at us, and start engaging us.  To start building a lifelong reputation, instead of trying to be a “one night brand” merely focused on quarterly campaigns.  In short, to help start a revolution that would change the essence of marketing itself.

The experience was unnerving.  After all,  it was the first time I have ever been that explicit.  Calling for a revolution is something you don’t do every day.  And in a country as advanced as Finland, there is of course the chance that no one would rise to the occasion.

But they did.  In fact, many people came up to me with the message that I was articulating what they were thinking.  Others also came up with suggestions on how to make the presentation better.  Areas I had missed and that could be included.

So with the Finnish digital marketing world on my side, I’ve decided it is now time to challenge the world.  Or better, I should say “we”, because my business partner Stefan Kolle has been at the heart of the new marketing model we propose in the presentation below.  A marketing reality which lets go of the “product push” mentality, and focuses on relevance, engagement and reputation.

Change Marketing v01

About the presentation

This presentation offers a digital perspective on life, as the audience at the event (Twitter: #Fword) was active in digital. But our view is larger than that.  That is why we will be applying the concept of  relevance, engagement and reputation to every aspect of the marketing mix.  From ROI to innovation.  From television to Twitter.

It also is an “open source project”.  Even though at Futurelab we can consider ourselves a bit ahead of the curve, reality is that we don’t know every detail on how the future of marketing will look either.  But we do believe that if we all work together, we can work it out.  So I would like to call on you to contribute.  We will shortly be launching a Ning community where all fellow revolutionaries can unite and discuss.  But until then I suggest you use the comment section below.

Because as the man said: Change Marketing.  Yes, We Can.