Three for a Quarter: The Customer Centricity Quarterly Tip Roundup
Blog #5: You can’t improve what you can’t measure
Customer Centricity is a business strategy and culture that puts the customer first. It applies across all aspects of work and can have multiple manifestations. To become more customer centric, you need to break it into tangible pieces and find a way to measure how you perform in them, including softer areas like relationships and culture.
The more granular you get, the clearer it will become what you need to improve. At Amdocs, we developed a program for measuring and improving customer centricity – the Amdocs Customer Centricity Framework. It looks at six different domains which we believe are all key. Our last tip roundup focused on Creating Value. This time we’ll focus on Measurement, which is about whether or not you are able to assess, monitor and communicate the value you are bringing to your customer.
Peter Drucker, widely regarded as the father of modern management, took the importance of measurement even further with his famous saying: “You can’t improve what you can’t measure”. Having the right measurements in place allows you to ensure customer business goals are being met, to continuously improve and to re-align strategy if not.
Tip #1: Make a point to understand the problem your customer is looking to solve, to know what to measure
Does your customer need to run faster than a lion?
Do you really understand what is the challenge your customer is looking to solve with your solution? This is key, not only for offering them the right solution – one which can truly solve their problem, but also for knowing what to measure to prove it. While your solution, once deployed, can impact any number of things, and for the better, it’s important to measure something that actually ties back to what your customer set out to achieve in the first place -- to show them you are delivering the value they were after.
When upcoming a hungry lion in the African Savannah – what would be your most pressing problem to solve so that you don’t become his next meal? In this hilarious TV commercial from 2007, sportswear company ASICS has proposed a creative solution. Whether or not you can run faster than the lion is not the measurement that would prove it worked…
Tip #2: Agree upfront with your customer on key performance indicators (KPIs) to measure, to be able to present a picture which is bigger than current rollout issues
“Life needs to be more than just solving everyday problems. You need to wake up and be excited about the future,” Elon Musk, business magnate
Agreeing upfront with your customer on key project KPIs, and then measuring, tracking and communicating around them on an ongoing basis, helps to keep sight of the business outcomes you set out to achieve for your customer when you started. This becomes even more important when projects extend over significant periods of time.
But there’s another reason why this is important. Throughout the project, your discussions with your customer can very easily gravitate towards what might be going wrong at that particular point in time. Measuring, tracking and communicating around key project KPIs can allow you to elevate these discussions to cover milestone improvements and benefits being achieved, and to be excited with your customer about their promise to their business.
Tip #3: Ensure your team has customer success metrics defined as part of their goals
"What gets measured gets done, what gets measured and fed back gets done well, what gets rewarded gets repeated," John E. Jones, leadership consultant and author
When you are measuring something you are influencing actions and priorities of individuals and teams, even more so when it is part of their personal performance goals. Measuring what’s important to the customer is therefore essential, not only for delivering the value your customer was looking to get from their project with you, but also so that you do not end up with counterproductive outcomes.
Are you clear on what you need to measure?
About the Amdocs Customer Centricity Framework
The Amdocs Customer Centricity Framework aims to help improve our engagements and relationships with our customers. As part of the program, customer-facing teams undergo an assessment targeted to measure their customer centricity maturity levels and identify areas where they can improve across six domains: Customer Relationship, Research, Prioritization, Creating Value, Measurement and Culture. An improvement plan is then put in place and executed upon.
