Curtis on…Realizing the Quickest Gains From Customer Culture
Curtis Bingham, Founder & Executive Director of the Chief Customer Officer Council on location at IQPC's Customer Experience Exchange in Berlin, shares where he thinks businesses can realize the quickest gains from customer centric culture.
Transcript for Curtis on…Realizing the Quickest Gains From Customer Culture
The quickest gains in realizing a customer-centric culture, I believe, come from three things. The first one is that you need to start with the data. You need to start collecting the customer data. That's absolutely critical because without that, you really can't get the executives on board.
So, starting out with the customer data; that is an element of earned authority. You need to be able to earn the authority to influence the organization, and some of that comes from your ability to understand the insight.
The next thing that you need to focus on is gathering this borrowed authority. The borrowed authority is the authority that you borrow from a champion, somebody else in the organization; and, perhaps, the best source of borrowed authority is the CEO. The more that you can get the CEO involved in the customer experience and engage the executives in the business of engaging customers, the greater authority that you have within the organization because they're out banging the drum for you. They're out championing your cause so that you don't have to.
Focusing on getting the data so that you can invite the executives in to participate and convince them that it is a wonderful thing, borrowing authority from the CEO, and then telling the customer story—those are the most important things that you need to do in order to start achieving some of the initial quick wins.
And then, following that, this is just one big marketing campaign. Just like we're marketing to our customers, we need to be marketing to our executives. We need to be marketing to our employees so that they can get on board and join in this revolution we're creating here.