Adjusting the Picture on Customer Focus
At first glance, big picture thinking and customer focus would seem to be mutually exclusive terms. After all, the first phrase connotes a farsighted, panoramic view of business, while the second implies an intense, laser-beam-like concentration on the customer. Yet as revealed in Magnifying Customer Focus: A Study of Current Trends and Future Possibilities 2006-2016, a global study commissioned by American Management Association and conducted by The Human Resource Institute, the terms are not only compatible, they are inseparable.
The study finds that customer focus is a top strategic concern for many businesses today and is ranked as one of the most important needs concerning issues ranging from leadership challenges to ethical behavior and innovation. Yet it also reveals that there is a wide disparity between what activities companies practice when it comes to customer focus and what they should be practicing.
The study asked respondents to rank a variety of strategic actions in each of five areas environment/culture, communications, HR practices, measurement and organizational practices in terms of what their companies are doing now and then to rank those same actions in terms of what their companies should be doing. Here is a closer look at the results for each of the five areas.
In environment/culture, having the support of top management ranked number one in both the should-do and doing-it-now categories. On the surface this would appear to be a heartening result leadership is doing what it should be doing.
But that good news is undercut by the number two should-do action: having leaders set the example with customer-focused behaviors. This is only number four in the doing-it-now category, meaning that while leadership may nominally support customer focus, it is not necessarily supporting it with its actions. Perhaps that helps explain why including customers in our corporate value statements ranked number two in the doing-it-now category but only number six in the should-do category; mission statements are all well and good, but its action that counts.
In the communications area, Magnifying Customer Focus finds that companies are falling short of communicating the customer focus message internally. Respondents ranked the action of having an internal plan in place to communicate customer insights number four in the should-do category, but only number seven in the doing-it-now category, suggesting that many companies are missing this crucial component. Its important to note that this doesn’t simply mean leadership handing down memos. It means employees at all levels of the organization must share their perspective and facilitate feedback from the customer so the company can get a true picture of the state of its customer service.
Companies are placing too much emphasis on market share as an indicator of customer satisfaction, according to respondents results in the area of measurement. Regularly measuring market share ranked third in the doing-it-now category, but eighth in the should-do category, strongly suggesting that respondents believe this particular metric is of little value when it comes to gauging customer satisfaction. Bain
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