Power to Improve Everything: Enabling the Customer-Centric Enterprise

From company-centric to customer-centric: today’s enterprise imperative
In response to a mailing, a customer calls a satellite radio company to transition from a free trial offer to a paid subscription — the goal of the mail promotion. The customer is put on hold while a customer service representative looks up his records. The wait goes on far too long, and the customer is on the verge of abandoning the call. An agent finally comes back on the line, but it’s a different agent. He tells the customer about the various subscription packages available.
The customer is puzzled: the six-month subscription costs less per month than the 12-month or 18-month offers. He knows it should be the other way around! The agent is puzzled too — and literally tells the customer, “Our systems are all messed up.”
Wrongly rewarded to do so, the customer takes the six-month subscription versus one of the longer-term, higher-value offers. Worse, the customer’s loyalty to the brand is shaken, making him suddenly vulnerable to a competitive offering.
This story is true. The company name has been withheld to protect the guilty. Today, too many enterprises are under-performing because they remain company-centric.
"Business leaders recognize superior customer experiences as a key market differentiator," explains Kathleen Peterson, CEO, PowerHouse Consulting — a specialist in enterprise, contact center and telecommunications among Fortune 500 companies. "Today’s organizations must be sharp, focused, and technically and emotionally equipped to handle the myriad of demands put upon them. In our Customer Experience Optimization Program, we assess the linkage between strategic goals and operational execution, which is often a massive gap in organizations. Developing and implementing a plan for action that yields a competitive advantage, these companies are able to better align themselves with their customers."
According to Jason Friday, vice president of technology operations for StarTek, a leading provider of business process outsourcing services for the communications industry, “Any company that doesn’t align itself with its customers risks alienating its base and losing sight of what its customers want.” In the case above, misalignment of agent performance, systems, processes, marketing and operations culminated in a botched interaction that cost the company revenue — and irrevocably lost goodwill. To make matters worse, it need not and should not have happened.
As Fred Reichheld, acclaimed author and director at Bain & Company, notes, “On average, U.S. corporations now lose half their customers in five years, half their employees in four, and half their investors in less than one.” From contact center to back office, from marketing to operations, enterprises that are company-centric as opposed to customer-centric are not only leaving money on the table, they are putting long-term success and shareholder value at risk.
Yet, despite this weight of evidence, the number of enterprises that can truly be described as customer-centric is “smaller than most people would think,” according to Brynn Palmer, director of the customer experience for Charter Communications, one of the largest cable operators in the United States. In her assessment, “Many companies have a view of how customers perceive them, but that view may not be in alignment with how customers really see the company. They have an inside-out view that is disconnected from the outside-in perspective.”
Palmer’s contention is validated by many sources. In fact, the growing enterprise imperative to become customer-centric comes amid increasing evidence that many companies are falling down on the job. Author of some of the seminal books on customer loyalty, Fred Reichheld has perhaps created the most significant focus on this issue with The Ultimate Question: Driving Good Profits and True Growth. In it, he contends that companies, in their single-minded pursuit of revenue, unwittingly penalize their best and most profitable customers — in some cases by offering more attractive deals and service offerings to new customers while “milking” loyal customers. Reichheld defines this as “bad profit” — and describes it as an ultimately destructive business practice.
Reichheld maintains that this is the kind of profit that justifies terms like profiteering, gives business a black eye, and actually shortens the life expectancies of businesses that seek it. He argues that “the best way to differentiate between good profit and bad is by measuring the loyalty of your most valuable assets.