“The Power of Keeping Customers at the Center of your Business”

Historically, the advances of technology innovations have driven the priorities of technology companies when designing and delivering new products and services.  The concepts and understanding of what new technologies could do absolutely consumed the attention of company’s in a manner that distracted from the actual human needs of enterprise customers attempting to do their jobs each week and of consumers who seek pleasant frictionless transactions throughout their day.

One of the most valuable insights into how to turn this perspective around is well described in Harley Manning’s and Kerry Bodine’s new book; “Outside In: The power of putting customers at the center of your business.” The purpose of this book is to outline concrete examples of customer centric business strategies and the associated return on investment. Additionally, the book outlines the Six Disciplines of Customer Experience as a framework that can be adopted by any organization “to master the outside in challenge.”

Key take aways from these The Six Disciplines include the following notes:

1. Strategy: Align the strategy with the overall company strategy and the organization’s brand attributes. Share strategy with all employees.
2. Customer Understanding; Solicit feedback and gather unsolicited feedback from customers about their experiences across the organization. Analyze customer insight drawn from across research techniques and organizational boundaries to identify key customer pain points and opportunities.
3. Design: Follow a defined customer experience design process any time a new experience is introduced. Engage customers, partners, and employees as part of the experience design process.
4. Measurement: Define a customer experience quality framework that aligns with how customers judge an experience and is consistent across the organization (channels and lines of business.) Model the relationship between drivers of customer experience quality, customer perceptions of their experiences, and the business outcomes.
5. Governance: Include impact to customer experience as a criterion for business decisions about policies, processes, technology, and communications. Maintain a dedicated queue of customer experience improvement projects.
6. Culture: Provide training to help new and existing employees build and maintain the skills they need to deliver on their part of the organization’s customer experience strategy.