Paul Frith - About the speaker
Paul Frith is Director of Performance Measurement & Analytics and Co-founder of Rubica. Paul leads on all of our performance measurement work – integrating it into our organisational change programmes so it ultimately improves performance. Learn more about Paul here.
Transcript
00.00 What being more customer centric delivers
It’s important that we build a customer centric way of working because for most of us it is actually our customers that drive our sustainability.
The way that we get things done tends to be internally focused, and we need to re-balance that. We need to build a culture that focuses on how we can support our customers to succeed and through that the success of our organisation will follow.
00.37 Build a case for change so you can be more customer centric
A fundamental step in creating a more customer centric culture is to state the case for change. And one of the reasons that is important is for many of the people in organisation’s they are quite far removed from the front-line, from the interactions with the customer. So, they are not really aware of some of the issues in supporting our customers.
Equally the case for change really helps people to understand the benefit we are trying to generate for the organisation and to have it clearly laid out is a fundamental step.
Outlining the case for change also enables teams to come together and really galvanise around making something good happen for the organisation.
01.19 The role of leaders in becoming more customer centric
A leaders role is to paint a really clear and detailed picture – to help people understand what is happening now and why that’s happening; and to understand what would happen if we carried on as we are; and also to outline the benefits that we are trying to achieve by making the shift to that more customer-centric culture.
One of the important things is for leaders to role model the change that they are wanting to happen. Because if we want this change to happen, we need to ensure that we have got a change at three levels: we need the leadership to make changes, we need the management team to make changes, and we are looking for changes from the individual contributors as well.
01.57 Hang out in the customer space so you can become more customer centric
At Rubica we believe one of the first steps to shifting towards a customer-centric culture is to really get the organisation to hang out in the customer space for longer that it is comfortable with. What this is about is seeing the real perspective from the customers eyes and to understand their world – how can we actually solve the problems that they are facing day to day, and actually make their lives easier?
By doing this we can understand where it fits into the customer experience, where it really matches their needs and where it doesn’t, perhaps where it needs some slight enhancements of additional services to make it really work for the customer. It also really helps us to understand the opportunity for growth – with everything that we now know about the customer needs in mind where could our products actually go? What does the opportunity really look like for the brands and services that we provide?
