⚠️ Unsupported Browser

Your browser is not supported.

The latest version of Safari, Chrome, Firefox, Internet Explorer or Microsoft Edge is required to use this website.

Click the button below to update and we look forward to seeing you soon.

Update now

How to use measures to build a customer-centric culture

Customer-first organisation 10th July 2019

About the speaker

Paul is Director of Performance Measurement & Analytics at Rubica. He applies his performance measurement expertise to the world of organisational change following a realisation: organisations want and need to understand the results of a change and where opportunity exists to drive additional change and further improve performance. Learn more about Paul.


Video transcript

00.08 How measurement can enable customer-centricity

Measurement can help the creation of a customer-centric culture by driving conversations.

If we make our customers central to the measurement framework then it creates a natural focus for the whole organisation on those important customers.

00.27 Establishing measures that support a customer-centric way of working

To establish the right measures and have a more customer-centric way of working, the starting point is to ensure that the customer is within our strategic goals.

If we then create measures that provide us with a clear picture of what that looks like when we are doing it well, we can use measures to get feedback on whether the strategy is working or not.

What we are looking to do is make sure the measures go into a dashboard and that that dashboard becomes an agenda for team meetings and executive leadership team meetings – showing what is actually happening on the strategy and providing us with an idea of whether success is being achieved or not.

01.05 Measures that encourage customer-centric behaviour

So, measurement shouldn’t be about just finding new customers. It is also about bolstering our relationship with the existing customers that we have – the most important customers for our business to be sustainable.

This is very much about focusing on how we can build stronger relationships or partnerships with those customers. Focusing in on what we can do to nurture that and really extend it to have a more valuable relationship.

So, the measures we that we are very much focused in on are what would drive the right outcomes for both the organisation as well as the customer – to give that win for both parties.

01.46 Measures to drive customer-centric behaviours and ways of working

Measurement can help us work together to enable a more customer-centric way of working by focusing in on the contribution the teams can make by working together cross-functionally. To do this, measurement needs to be focused on the behaviours that will really drive that success.

So, what we are looking to do is make sure we are including measures within the mechanisms of the organisation (processes and ways of working) to really support and enable those behaviours to happen over time.

02.16 Responding to measures effectively

We need to effectively respond to what our measures are telling us, and we need to remember that a good measure should tell a continuous story over time.

We need to make sure we are not responding to one or two data points and reacting to them, but to get a real picture or trend we need to look at about twelve data points and then respond accordingly to drive the behaviours that we are looking for.

02.40 Common measurement pitfalls

So, one of the common stumbling blocks of using measurement is that we use measures to judge people, instead of using them as a way of learning and continuous development. And we need to be mindful that people often actually feel threatened by measures because they’ve been judged when using them before.

What we are really trying to do is use the measures to galvanise the team behind the results that we are looking to achieve and make sure those outcomes come to fruition.

03.09 Advice

So, my one piece of advice if you are looking to use measurement as part of a customer centric way of working would be within business reviews – balance up the use of measures on product and service contribution to the business, with the contribution of critical customer groups to the business’ growth.

[END]