What is Customer Focus?

Customer Focus is more than Customer Service. It is an aligned whole-organization approach to customer satisfaction and service, leading to customer loyalty and advocacy. The result is sustainable profitability.

In a Customer Focused organization, Leadership, Processes and People are customer-aligned. In broad strokes this means that:

* Every action is shaped by a relentless commitment to meeting and exceeding customer expectations regarding product and service quality.

* Customer touching and supporting internal processes are constantly evaluated and improved to meet or exceed those expectations.

* Employees are aware of their role in maintaining a valued relationship with their external and internal customers.

My experience based 10 Success Factors

1. Use a piloting approach. Learn, adjust and then roll out, while using managers involved as internal change agents and catalysts.

2. Allocate role of Senior Sponsor for the initiative.

3. Create a balanced set of customer-based measures as key indicators to manage the business and enable real accountability for them.

4. Design Customer Focus from the outside in (driven by the Voice of the Customer) and deliver it from the inside out (using the Voice of the Customer to drive internal deployment, culture change and alignment).

5. Conduct external measurements and surveys first and act on them with clear priority setting and assigning accountability for outcomes.

6. Do not conduct internal climate or employee satisfaction until the Customer Focus initiative is well underway, organized, structured, resourced and communicated.

7. Ensure that your People/HR team translates the customer needs into Customer Focused hiring specifications.

8. Ensure that the performance management system is aligned to the Customer Focus initiative, and measures and rewards to desired Customer Focused behaviors and skills.

9. Ensure that middle managers and senior leaders lead by example and do what is said; avoid the Say-Do gap trap.

10. Make communications into a forethought and harness it to support the required cultural transformation.

Other articles you might like:

• Where is the Leadership for Customer Focus?
• The new old rules of engagement
• Customer Service Book Review: Choosing Civility
• Customer Service Quote for October 19, 2009
• Getting back to basics (of customer service)

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