Customer 3D creates a changed worldview of customers, which becomes a “wearable” for your organization. Once you embrace it, you wonder how your company lived without it.

It’s easy for organizations to explain what they already are doing well for the customer. It’s often difficult for them to explain what they could have done better.

Many companies believe that they can develop a customer-focused organization through a command-and-control approach. The reality is that becoming customer-centered will never happen without a deep-rooted culture that allows it to flourish. Michael Jones, in The Roots of Aliveness, introduces a brilliant metaphor for business success—the ecology of a tree. Here’s how he describes the process […]

Thinking like a customer, when it is engrained in a culture, creates freedom – the willingness to point out shortfalls in current company processes and the passion to identify new opportunities that will make their company easier to work with.

In every industry, there are exceptional performers that don’t have to look for customers. Instead, they draw them in by defining the future that these devotees want to be shown. Rather than trying to perfect what is already being done, Customer 3D companies question what is not being said and then go after that new dimension.

Customer-centricity will create a new dimension of success that many companies cannot picture because they are being held back by their assumptions. The journey starts with the realization that success will come when a different organizational culture is in place and that it is worth the effort to change.

Customer-centered organizations create positive customer conditioning through a system that delivers great company-wide ideas, not through transactional courtesy on the part of individual employees.

Use creative ways shake up your thinking and to open “the floodgates of inspiration.” Lisa Aschmann's song scenarios provide innovative ideas for doing great things for customers.

The power of customer-centricity is strongest at Levels 2 and 3, which create a balanced system that permeates the internal silos that exist in most businesses. These high-level, customer-centered strategies produce higher loyalty and customer closeness in organizations that embrace them.

Teams should use creative storytelling to sell customer-connection ideas within their organizations. Visual examples will make the argument more convincing.Clear reasoning will take you from a state of “I think we should…” to “Here is what change will mean to our customers.”

The Customer-Centric Index™ measures closeness with external customers and strength of relationships with internal customers. It's geared to focus on silo-busting. It's systematic and consists of highly-specific measures of the behaviors that experience has shown will make organizations more customer-centric.

Why should any supplier-centric organization switch to being customer-centric? It’s not difficult to imagine the arguments against the change: “Customer-centricity is an abstract idea. It involves a culture change. We prefer pragmatic results to ideology. Show us the benefits.”

Here's a look at the "Why" of customer-centricity.

Make sure that your organization is prepared for change by putting some customer-centered monitors in place that will condition everyone to look for new ways by questioning the old ways. Set up a process to evaluate change on customers’ terms, not yours. It will be a great platform to start discussions of ways to strengthen your organization by consistently looking for ways to outperform.

The word "engagement" with customers is used too casually. In a customer-centered view, you would not “win” and “keep” customers, but rather, cooperate with them as partners for a single purpose.

No organization can afford to stand still. The best way to avoid inertia is to think like a customer. Because innovation is on a continuum, companies must constantly evaluate where they are.

Instilling customer-centricity into your organization’s culture is not impossible, of course. But questioning works better than telling when you have a challenge to overcome. It creates buy-in when the team with whom you are working figures out how to approach the goal more realistically.

Earning the trust of your customers is easier with a well-designed, customer centric plan and inspired leadership.

Treat customers and non-customers with a spirit of generosity.

A few passionate managers can change the culture in an organization by leading their team toward customer-centricity. Executive leadership must set the tone and direction for customer-centricity. But middle managers are in the best position to know when to take off the training wheels and make change happen.

It's amazing how organizations believe they can become great while ignoring their customers. Jim Collins' How The Mighty Fall: And Why Some Companies Never Give In builds off of his Good to Great and Built to Last tenets to analyze how successful companies get better, or conversely, how they decline. He describes how companies can under-perform by […]

Alan Webber's Rules of Thumb is an absolute must-read. It is quintessential to leading your organization through the next day, week, year and beyond. It is game-changing, but simple. It is practical and inspiring at the same time. And it weighs in solidly on thinking like a customer. For example, Webber's Rule #3 is ‘Ask the […]

Becoming customer-centric is transformational and it requires a change in culture as well as in process design. It demands a long-term commitment that involves everyone in your organization. However, there is one proven method to jump-start the process in a way that will accelerate the company-wide commitment to the journey. The graphic with this article […]

Sometimes you need to invent a word to describe something that has not actually been well-defined before. Sometimes you need to invent a word to describe something that you really care about. I had the great fortune to meet a team leader in the service industry recently at her job. She was the perfect combination […]