Fiona McAnena, VP Innovation, PepsiCo, Sylvie Barr, marketing director, Grohe, Nick Smith, group MD, Accenture Marketing Services, Richard Tolley, group marketing development director, Dairy Crest, Steward Walker from Mini and Jeremy Caplin and Martin Hayward from dunnhumby and the society's Hugh Burkitt debate the key challenges for customer champions
Becoming a genuine customer-centric organisation is tough. Many businesses regard customers as a cost rather than a benefit, and here lies the problem. Pleasing customers is fine if it doesn't get in the way of profit. It works when it does not collide with the short-term targets of the business.
Yet for many marketers working in a business with a short-term focus, the long-term strategy of customer centricity is often at odds with the goals of the rest of the organisation. While most companies often have the best intentions for their customers, they are often pushed down the agenda in favour of achieving sales and financial targets.
The key challenges
1/ Creating a core purpose that the entire organisation can engage with
For example, Tesco's mission is to, “Create value for customers to gain their life-time loyalty,” – a statement that all areas of the business can understand and be motivated by. How many other companies have a business plan that places the customer at the centre? Dunnhumby analysed a raft of different companies' Mission and Values and discovered that most sectors do now feature their customers. (This was not the case for financial service companies.) The tricky part is translating these missions into real company behaviour.
2/ The importance of getting the right metrics in place
Marketers tend to focus on measuring how their own department is performing. This analysis needs to broaden to include metrics that the whole business can value. Collaborate with the financial team to establish how business performance can be measured for the long term. These metrics must include ways of measuring customers and become embedded into the organisation.
3/ Marketers must move from managing the message to activating the agenda
Marketers should become leaders of the practice area of marketing and surrender their role to the whole organisation. Instead, bring an external perspective to your organisation, help the company to define its purpose, to use language which everyone understands, orchestrate the different views of the company and engage everyone in the process.
4/Define customer centricity for your organisation
What does customer centricity really mean for your business? Define your customer segments and analyse what each of these segments really value, remember this is not necessarily the same as what they want.
5/ Source and spread best practice examples
Involve the rest of the organisation in finding examples of customer championship within your business. British Gas asked customers and customer-facing staff to define what the company does, rather than just leaving it to the marketing department.
Email any of your examples of customer championship, to elen.lewis@marketing-society.org.uk. This will help us build a source of best practice on the website for members. To read a longer version of notes from last month's round table on customer champions, go to the Inspire section of the website.