Customer Centricity and Measuring Success with Agility

The long-running organizational fights about who owns the customer or the customer experience are almost always a significant waste of time, energy, and money.

While we look to overcome silos, fragmented experiences, data accessibility, dark zones, and competing priorities, claims of ownership never get us ahead.

From experience, it equals in-fighting and digging in heels. It's counterproductive and stifles attempts to create real holistic experiences, wasting calories wrestling for control, which only prevents getting better at delivering it.

Who Cares?

But why do we care who owns it? The customer doesn't care if it's marketing, sales, product, customer service, or others. Consumers only see an experience done well or poorly.

PWC's Future of the Customer Report indicated that 73% of consumers said the customer experience is essential in purchasing decisions. However, only 49% of consumers say companies provide a good customer experience today.

So, it's time to stop debating "ownership" and focus on working together to generate it collectively.

Lead Instead of Own

Marketers love self-congratulatory sound bites on being customer-obsessed, customer-focused, or having a customer-first stance. The problem is it's bullocks without a reliable way to deliver and measure it consistently.

From the marketing POV, let's consider earning the opportunity to lead versus futile arm-wrestling over ownership. We can learn from business agility and the power of unifying around a common set of values and practices that stimulate new thinking, collaboration, and innovation focused on the customer.

A Culture of Collaboration for a 360 View

As a central function, marketing can bring things together and lead cross-functional collaboration as facilitators, not owners. We can play a huge role in collecting the sum of parts with a 360-degree view, demonstrating the ability to orchestrate, lead, and referee.

Discipline in Customer Centricity from Agile Marketing

I raise the application of agility in marketing to build muscle memory in how we act to generate custom-centric value as an embedded discipline in our approach.

Marketing already uses personas and customer journeys; agile marketing adds the impact of customer stories and works with incremental delivery to understand what they genuinely value.

It is a discipline for marketing to take the lead, demonstrating and extending out to others. It's a win for all involved. Most importantly, it is a win for the customer.

Measuring Customer Centricity - Traditional Approaches

"What gets measured gets managed" was a core tenet of Peter Drucker, and it applies here.

We've defaulted to traditional measures of customer-centricity (qualitative and quantitative) that include Net Promoter Score (NPS), Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT), Customer Lifetime Value (CLV), Feedback and Reviews, Repeat Purchase Rate, Customer Retention Rate, Surveys and Interviews as well as Social Media Engagement.

However, one issue is that many of these are lag indicators and do not facilitate immediate in-stream action. A second concern is that traditional measures do not address the discipline of our people, teams, and processes. We need to assess our capabilities that generate customer-centric value in the first place.

Working with agility, we can supplement traditional measures and enhance our approach.

Adding Agility in the Customer-Centric Measurement Mix

Agile marketing introduces a framework to embed customer centricity from the outset, leveraging a proven methodology from software development, IT, and Product use of agile.

First, when applied to marketing, it provides the ability to measure with the intent of taking immediate action to adjust efforts in real time. It serves to rapidly check the pulse and respond versus waiting on "lag" metrics and miss opportunities for time-sensitive adjustments.

Second, we can get right to the source with our team dynamics and effectiveness, helping to measure the application of mindset, behaviours, and practices critical in generating customer-centric value. The extent to which a team collaborates and embraces customer-first thinking as a cohesive discipline can be assessed and measured.

On those points, quantitative and qualitative methods within agile marketing shed more light on customer-centric capabilities and outcomes with the following in play:

1. Hypothesis-driven testing and learning validate if we've generated customer value. Rapid deployment of tests with real-time results becomes an always-on and vital routine to determine customer responsiveness to what we deliver.
2. Customer Feedback loops from incremental delivery create an ongoing dialogue to gather insights quickly. It is a direct line to gauge relevance and value right on the heels of putting our marketing into their hands.
3. Team Improvement Ceremonies establish ongoing opportunities to reflect on team effectiveness, embracing transparency in team communications to identify improvements and take immediate action to get better at customer-first thinking and execution.
4. Assessments of Team Satisfaction provide an inward look at the team (versus outward with customers) to gauge team engagement and satisfaction. High levels of satisfaction indicate a motivated team likely to deliver exceptional customer experiences, underpinned by a positive culture that maintains customer focus.
5. Assessment of Team Performance identifies how the team is performing in terms of delivering against targets and expectations. Campaign or marketing KPIs and results tracking become a proxy for determining if customer-centric value was created.
6. Team Maturity Models assess the level of maturity in terms of applying agile principles and practices. A lag indicator, it scores the team on the appropriate levels of collaboration, customer centricity, adaptability, and continuous improvement outcomes as the team matures.

When the Customer Wins, We All Win.

I've been in marketing long enough to have seen a lot. Perfect solutions do not exist; there are only ways to get better and consistently improve.

What I know is that leadership over ownership will do us all better. Collaborating over dictating, with input and contribution at all levels, is a better equation to get us closer to where we want to be.

Call it customer-focused, customer-first, customer-obsessed, or any sound bite you like as long as that means having the rigor and right operating system to improve and move the needle collectively.

Written by: Michael Seaton