Tool 18. CREATING A CUSTOMER FOCUS

About This Tool

To win in today's complex and dynamic business environment, leading companies are redefining, reorganizing and managing their businesses around the customer. They're finding they can no longer define themselves in terms of their products and services; and that the company, its mission and its operations must be re-thought in customer terms. To do that, these companies are getting really good at understanding and anticipating customers' expectations, defining and measuring customer value, and managing the total customer experience.

This is what many refer to as a customer focus. When done well, this capability can really set an organization apart from its competitors. However, despite the claims made by many, a customer focus is much more than slogans, surveys and statistics. It's an inherent part of the company's fiber and it is evident in every person, process and decision the company makes. A true customer focus is about continuously engaging the customer, on multiple levels, in a deep partnership of joint planning, collaborating, problem solving and integrating key connected parts of their respective operations. A true customer focus engages the heart and mind of every employee, and every value chain partner, to think and act in a way that creates value for the ultimate customer. That customer value then translates into shareholder value.

Using This Tool

HR teams can play a major role in designing and advancing an organization's customer focus. Traditional priorities like recruiting, retention, cost and productivity management and others must still be done - and done well; and that won't change. In today's economy however, such teams need to expand their focus and increasingly look outside of the company for ways to create additional competitive advantage. People practices and processes need to build external, not internal, unity in order to add greater value. When a company's people practices are shaped around the needs, values and interests of external customers - everybody wins.

This tool captures some of the key elements needed to create a customer focus capability. It can be used as a planning framework, a discussion guide or an organizational assessment tool. For each question listed, there's an answer scale of 1 to 10. Descriptors are provided for the scores of 1, 5.5 and 10. Using the descriptors as reference points, select the score that best reflects where the organization is relative to the 10 point scale. The descriptors for a score of 10 were developed based on the best practices of actual companies, so they can be used to help identify the gap between best practice and where the organization is currently.

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