WHY SHOULD WE WANT A CUSTOMER-CENTRIC CULTURE?
Having a customer-centric culture helps us work on the right things with our limited improvement resources. And by“ right”, we mean initiatives that actually improve the customer experience and increase customer satisfaction.
By working on the right things, you avoid wasting service improvement resources on things that don’ t improve service.
And when we start thinking about culture, our focus changes from tools and processes to developing the skills, behaviours and attitudes of our support staff. It’ s time to address that cultural debt!
When we start thinking about the customer, putting them first, looking beyond tools and processes, and into the customer-focused skills and behaviours of our staff, we find that the service delivery team shifts from being techno-centric to customer-centric.
These five steps are: 1. Walk-the-walk leadership. 2. Three listening posts. 3. Customer satisfaction metrics. 4. Feedback for staff coaching. 5. Customer-driven CSI.
Customer centricity is good for the customer and good for IT too. Because many of the things that we do to improve service reduce costs. More on that later!
You can have your cake and eat it too!
Things that make your customers happy also reduce your support costs
# 1 WALK-THE-WALK LEADERSHIP
A customer-centric culture requires a leader who wants it, can inspire it and is able to create an environment where it can happen.
Leaders shape the way people think and behave. Employees look at them to see that their behaviour is consistent with the organisation’ s vision and values.
Well-developed tools and processes? People and culture, not so much?
WHAT DOES A CUSTOMER-CENTRIC CULTURE LOOK LIKE?
A customer-centric IT culture is ultimately one where the normal behaviour of everyone in IT provides customers with positive experiences. And products and services that they value.
Many IT teams are actually techno-centric. They’ re very focused on tools and processes at the expense of customerfocused behaviours and skills.
In this article, I’ ll outline five steps to becoming customercentric.
Without that leadership from the CIO, a customer-centric culture, homogenous across all service delivery teams, just won’ t stick.
A CIO needs to exhibit visible signs of commitment to customer centricity, or employees will dismiss it as yet another flavour of the month.
Here are seven ways that a CIO can walk-the-walk of customer-centricity:
Sells the vision. Makes sure everyone knows where this bus is going, why it’ s going there, what the journey’ s going to be like, and how good it’ s going to be when we get there.
Sets customer satisfaction targets. Gives the team clear, achievable, shared customer satisfaction goals and a way to measure progress towards those goals.
Promotes cross-functional collaboration. Removes the organisational barriers that prevent teams from collaborating. For example, in one organisation we worked
10 itSMF Bulletin— November 2017