When you really become customer-centered you take your business to a new dimension of performance. By focusing on a single purpose—customer success—other day-to-day problems magically disappear. It's amazing how many other internal issues get resolved when the customer is your first priority. Customer-centered companies don’t have these types of problems:
Internal Issue: Product-centering “cuts off the air supply” in conventional organizations. When departments have their own agendas, work becomes disjointed in the eyes of the customer. In Customer 3D businesses, integrated thinking creates permeability between functional silos. Instead of what Steve Jobs called The Bozo Factor (Steve Jobs, by Walter Isaacson), collaborations happen naturally and improvements can be made holistically.
Internal Issue: The efficiency mindset dominates. It is focused on cost reduction and, in many cases, a parallel reduction in the number of employees. In this scenario, the best that can happen would be perpetuating existing performance levels. In Customer 3D companies, instead of people trying to tweak the status quo, they are using creative thinking to replace it.
Internal Issue: Employee morale is low and they are simply waiting to be told what to do. In Customer 3D organizations, employees are purposeful because they are focused externally on customer needs. Leaders are supportive of employee ideas. Beginning with the end in mind equates to visualizing how ideas will impact the customer.
Internal Issue: Change is not sustainable. Therefore, initiatives come across as flavor of the month approaches. In Customer 3D businesses, change becomes transformation and it sticks. There is an improvement culture in which all improvement projects are looked at as part of a single portfolio.
Customer 3D solves problems, but not in the ways you might expect. Becoming customer-centered weaves a single worldview through the fabric of the organization. It changes an organization’s overall performance. Not only do your customers see it, of course, but your employees, your Board, your suppliers—everybody sees that you are different.
