 AI news is dominating work-related newsfeeds, replacing contact centre agents, and simplifying customer lives.
Yet hardly anyone talks about the curveballs AI-powered customers are about to throw at brands and vendors, or how these changes will redefine the experiences businesses need to deliver.  “We have a clear customer strategy, yet it’s so hard to get our people to implement it. To create a customer-centric culture. How do we fix that?”
It’s one of the most popular questions I get on customer transformation.  When I talk to senior executives behind closed doors, I often hear the same story.
Life is fine for now, but the rate of change in technology and society is going so fast that it’s getting impossible to keep up.  If I listen to the experts on LinkedIn, customer success in 2024 is about digital transformation, data and, of course, AI.
Of course they are right  They say you cannot win an ice hockey match by chasing the puck. You need to skate where it will be.
I increasingly think of this expression when reviewing and discussing customer strategies.  Over the years, I’ve worked on quite a few ‘corporate transformation’ programmes. Some were highly successful. Others we don’t talk about.
Typically, success and failure depended on the behaviour of the people in charge. Including my own. Though looking at each experience as a learning opportunity, I have identified a few behaviours of which I remind myself every time I work on a new project or with a new team. They typically live as a reminder in my (digital) drawer. So I cleaned them up a bit, to share in this article.  These days, every leadership team wants to see a mindset change in their people. They need to be more customer-centric. More digital. More agile. More innovative. More sustainable. More lean. More in love with the colour blue.
To make this happen, companies unleash so many transformation programmes that merely mentioning the T-word makes employees roll their eyes in despair. Only this year, I’ve had multiple executives tell me “what ever the content, let’s not call what we are doing a transformation.”  Leaders regularly say that they want to ‘change the mindset’ of their people. But can that really be done? And if you were to persist, what are the implications?
In another element to the transformation algorithm I’m building, I explore the concept of mindset change. The post isn’t as clearly written as I would like, but I’m told that ‘done is better than perfect’. So, if you see opportunities to improve, ask, comment, complement or (constructively) disagree. I'm sure we'll both learn from it!  This Summer is turning out to be hot in more ways than one.
In the past 7 days I’ve been to Milan, Vienna and Stockholm while having a dozen digital and in-person meetings in-between. After 2 years of Covid-induced digital scrambling, corporate mind-space is returning to get real about customer experience. 6/16/2022 In Leadership, Bias is a B**ch What if I told you that - as a leader - you were delusional, prejudiced and unable to make any kind of objective decision? You would probably take offence.
And yet, these adjectives apply to me on an almost daily basis. Is this where you worry about me? |
AuthorAlain Thys helps leaders in large organisations drive profit and growth through customer transformation. Archives
January 2025
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1/25/2025
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