ORGANISING AROUND 'THE CUSTOMER': THE UNTAPPED MOTIVATOR

Our focus in facilitating Cultural Change is constant: Ensuring that the management are clear about how they will ‘lead for the customer’ as a team, thereby engaging their staff in a process of continuous improvement and creating a culture of Customer Leadership across the organisation.

In practical terms, alignment is achieved by:

• Implementing measureable strategies and objectives – translated from a ‘customer-focused’ review and interpretation of your organisational vision, and;
• Embedding evidenced-based Customer Behaviours– established from a ‘customer-focused’ review and interpretation of your organisational values.

Such re-focused leadership enables the ‘vision and values’ of the organisation to be translated into the reality of everyday working life. However, it is hard to get these to live in the day-to-day reality of ‘how we do business’, and if leaders, middle management and frontline staff all have a different understanding or focus, then the potential for organisational ‘non-alignment’ exists. Even when everyone is effectively pointing in the same direction, if this is not directly reflective of customer expectations then significant organisational ‘mis-alignment’ is likely to occur.

Thus JOURNEY seeks to find leaders throughout the organisation to act as Change Agents, who can set the tone of the organisation; it is they who will be critical in creating and sustaining change. Engaging them in the principles of effective ‘customer focus’ and aligning the whole business (people and process) to that end is therefore an essential starting point.

In our experience, when everyone is engaged with the customer – when they understand the customer’s expectations and understand their own role in delivering great outcomes - they can be energised to change the way the organisation works relatively quickly.

This involves staff across the organisation in defining:

• the things they need to do differently (resulting in new and clear objectives), and:

• how they will need to act to do this (resulting in a set of balanced customer behaviours)

The result of this is that it encourages far greater ownership of the organisational ‘vision and values’ - and the commitment and energy to bring them to life. Once new, customer-focused objectives and behaviours have been developed and embedded in all the relevant people initiatives and business processes, a powerfully aligned Customer Culture can be created.

Even then there is plenty for the leadership to do to ensure that this new culture is sustained, not least of which involves role-modelling the vision and values by their own actions, day in, day out. Beyond this, leaders also need to ensure that they constantly strive to improve the experience that the business offers to its customers and to measure and manage the right things to make sure this happens.