Curtis On…Customer Centricity as a Marketing Strategy: 6. Including Back Office in the Desired Audience
In this sixth of a ten part series of videos, Curtis Bingham, Founder and Executive Director of the Chief Customer Officer Council on location at IQPC's CMO Exchange in London, July 2011, explains why you need to include the back office as part of your desired audience when you embed customer centricity in your organization.
Transcript for Curtis On…Customer Centricity as a Marketing Strategy: 6. Including Back Office in the Desired Audience
It's important not to just stop there. So, we've got impact—choosing those people in the company who are going to have the greatest impact; then, focusing on allies. It would be easy to stop there. But it really can't stop there. It would be a mistake.
So, the next thing that you need to do is to take this into the back office. How can you get those people who are not directly associated with customers involved in this notion of customer centricity? How can you help every employee make a personal connection with the customer?
There's one brilliant example that I heard a little while back where a B2B software and technology company brought in key customers who had big issues into the headquarters and had them present their issues in front of a big panel of software engineers.
The software engineers had never smelt or touched a customer before; and it was the first time that they had ever been in the same room with a customer. The customers presented the problems that they were having, and the engineers had eight hours to go and find some solutions to the customers’ problems.
It was amazing. These engineers absolutely loved everything that they were doing. They were engaged. They had a face rather than just some nebulous ticket number that was in their help and support system.
If any of you go and visit Intuit’s campus particularly in the QuickBooks division, you'll see plastered on every single wall in every public space huge posters with a picture of a small business customer on the poster; and around it is all of the business case, all of the reasons why they use it, and some of the problems that they're having. And in the bottom here, there's a little takeaway sheet that describes the customer and how that customer is using the software.
It's fascinating to look at this because everybody can go and say very informatively, “I know what our customers want because it's on here; here's the sheet that we can prove it with.”
It gave them a personal face to the customer, and it gave them a reason to come to work in the morning and a reason to do just a little bit more to help this customer, a reason not to clock out at five but to stay just a little bit later to make sure that customer was served.