John Guaspari
Founding Principal
Deep Customer Connections, Inc.
john.guaspari@DeepCustomerConnections.com
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Overlooking the Real Opportunity of "Customer-Centricity"
Remember back in the '80s, when the market for personal computers first began to inch its way into the home? Articles began popping up in general interest magazines like Time and Newsweek. Feature stories about the potential of these powerful new tools became staples of all the network news programs. Charismatic business leaders criss-crossed the country-criss-crossed the globe-painting compelling pictures of a future awash in the benefits to be ushered in by "insanely great" technology. Clearly, this was big, big stuff.
So what was the one, consensus application-the one invaluable use to which this powerful computing power would inevitably be put-that was always cited? It was this: "And a personal computer will be a convenient way to catalog and track your recipes!"
Now, even allowing for the inevitable holes in two-decade-old memories, I don't seem to recall recipe storage and retrieval as being a wedge issue in either of the presidential campaigns
of that period. But even if recipe management were that big a deal, positioning it as the primary reason to buy a personal computer would seem roughly akin to advertising the Humvee as "The ideal mode of transportation for driving to the curb to put out the trash and pick up the mail!"
So what does this have to do with CRM?
Readers of this newsletter do not need to be convinced of the power and efficacy of a well-wrought CRM implementation. Gathering and culling information about customers...getting it to the right places at the right time...using it to make the right decisions as to what levels of attention should be lavished on which groups of customers...ensuring that the loyalty of the most profitable customers is ensured...all ultimately in the service of creating a more customer-centric organization. All of these are manifestly worthwhile pursuits. The sermon to the choir will, therefore, cease forthwith.
But now let me offer a dash of heresy
just to spice things up. While all of those benefits are important-make that essential-rationales for a CRM implementation, viewing them as the primary reason for the pursuit of customer-concentricity misses a larger and far more important point.
Question: Is the purpose of Customer Relationship Management to more effectively manage relationships with ever more loyal customers or to create ever more elegant analytical models?
A Somewhat Blunter Question: Is the bigger challenge gathering the information that will help you understand what will cause customers to give their money to you rather than to the other guys or getting your $%!@#* organizations to do the things it needs to do-to take the kind of action required-to get customers to give their money to you rather than to the other guys?
Assertion #1: In the quest to create a truly customer-centric organization, the biggest obstacle that needs to be overcome is not an information gap.
Rather, it's an action gap.
Assertion #2: The means of closing that gap reside within the tools, techniques, and-most important of all-the impulses that led you to undertake a CRM implementation. But to employ them, you first have to look at CRM and its role in creating a customer-centric organization in a non-traditional way.
There is a long history of "big ideas" that have yielded not-so-big results.
A bit of historical perspective might be helpful here. Since 1980, the business world has gone through multiple business philosophies. Each seemed to be based on sound principles and had demonstrated economic benefits.
- Total Quality Management
- Empowerment
- Reengineering
Yet another question: Did these various "big ideas" eventually come up short because of a lack of technical rigor and flawed fundamental principles?
I don't think so. I think it was because of a disconnect between these practices'
hyperbolic promise and the rather more quotidian realities of their practice. And it was that disconnect that eroded the institutional will to persevere... people's energy to stay the course.
Total Quality Management is about making sure that you screw up less than you used to. Important? Absolutely. Worth pursuing? You bet. But hardly something that will stoke people's fires over the long haul. Empowerment is a little too soft and squishy for most serious business people's comfort. And as for reengineering-the Darth Vader of change strategies-well, let's just say that it doesn't take very long for people to understand that volunteering for a suicide mission tends not to be a good career move.
The common denominator? While all of these approaches would seem to make good, logical sense-you can safely mark "left brain issues covered" on your checklist-they would seem to ignore the fact that as long as organizations are peppered with pesky, quirky, carbon-based
life forms, there is another dimension to be considered. Not "irrational", but "extra-rational." The soft stuff has to be considered, too.
Therein lies the power-the secret-of customer-centricity.
We talk-correctly-about the importance of putting the customer at the center of all work activities. After all, as Harvard Business School marketing guru Theodore Levitt has famously written, "The purpose of a business is to create and keep a customer." So if the very purpose of a business has to do with customer creation and retention, shouldn't said customers be right at the center of all activities?
Of course. But this truism overlooks a rather important distinction. While it's unquestionably important to put the customer at the center of the organization's activities, the concept of "customer" is already at the center of-in the marrow of-all of the people who make up any business organization. Everybody in any organization has a lifetime's
experience as a customer. They know what that is, what that means, what that feels like. They know what pleases them as customers and causes them to go back for more. They know what displeases them and causes them to seek out alternatives. This universally shared sense of "customer-ness" (yes, an ugly word, but it's descriptively useful) can provide you with a direct, unobstructed path to some very deep-seated emotional-which is to say "energy releasing"-triggers in all of your people.
When you get people thinking and dealing with customer related issues, they know that they're dealing with something more than simply "making sure they screw up less often." They know that they're right at the heart-at the center-of the business, and not simply indulging someone's "we are the world" feels-good dreams. And, most definitely, they know that they're involved in creating something positive, not heading off on a suicide mission.
Customer-centricity is an important,
profound concept, and the results it can yield can be made that much more important and profound-if you recognize that it innately exists in all of your people. It's not a matter of them putting the customer at the center of your organization's activities. It's a matter of you recognizing that the customer is already at the center of your people's existence.
Recognize that difference. Put it to work for you. Then watch what you can make happen with CRM, customer-centricity, and the rest of "all that customer stuff."
John Guaspari is a founding principal of Deep Customer Connections, Inc., a Cambridge, Massachusetts based management consulting firm. You can email him at John.Guaspari@DeepCustomerConnections.com.
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