Scaling Customer Obsession In Your Organization, Part 1: Leadership
High-growth companies have an obsession with customer obsession.
Several high profile, high-growth companies — Amazon, Slack, Southwest, Zappos — have proven that being customer-obsessed can both deliver great shareholder value and create a sustainable market advantage over time.
Saying that customer obsession is required for growth is one thing. Actually delivering is quite another. In some of my previous roles as a product leader, I found it hard to get a customer-obsessed culture off the ground if their culture was already “obsessed” with optimizing shareholder value, or employee value. For startups, creating a customer-obsessed culture is easier if the founders start with it from the beginning, and are open to doing the right thing to scale the culture with their growth.
In this series of articles, I want to explore what it looks like to instill a customer-obsessed culture in an organization from the start, and how to then scale it with the organization. Doing so requires asking 4 main questions:
- Do you have the right leadership?
- Do you have the right incentives for that leadership?
- Are you investing in the right skills and tools?
- Are you taking steps to actively engage your customers?
Here, I want to tackle those first two questions, since they revolve around the foundation of any culture: The organization’s leadership.
Do You Have the Right Leadership?
Having the right leadership is key because leadership is what makes the organization’s value stick over the long run. Actions speak louder than words here, and actions of the executives and mid-management can make or break the customer obsession culture in an organization.
For example, leaders should think of their role in a customer-obsessed culture as involving:
Customer Evangelism
Team members take their cues from their leader’s behavior every day. Leaders are the best customer evangelists in the organization.
One of my former execs once asked me this question during a meeting: “Would you make the same decision if you had a customer sitting in this meeting?” That was a powerful motivator for me because it forced me to think about how to be an advocate for that customer. It made me want to ask questions, review customer journeys, seek to understand customer insights and come to those meetings knowing the customer inside and out.
More importantly, it made me want to ensure that any and all business decisions were aligned to create customer value and delight daily.
Lead from the Front
Leaders can be effective evangelists, but only if they invest time with customers weekly. If leaders don’t talk to customers, read their feedback, join support and sales calls, or attend customer councils, leaders will have a hard time preaching to the organization an idea they don’t really practice.
Rule of thumb: If your leaders are not spending two hours a week on customer immersion activity weekly, then it is hard to make the value thrive in the organization.
Empower Frontline Employees
For the customer obsession to thrive in the organization, every front-line employee should be able to make customer-centric decisions daily. This is possible when teams are not just taught the values, but are empowered to do the right thing for customers. Leaders should create an environment where front-line employees are empowered and rewarded for their customer-centric behaviors.
Do You Have the Right Incentives for that Leadership?
Looking at the above list, it’s probably clear whether you have the right kind of leaders in your organization, or not. They will be the individuals with deep customer empathy, who “walk the walk” when it comes to customer obsession — and hopefully, who have had experience at successful customer-focused organizations before.
If you do not have those leaders in place, you need to hire them. Likewise, you must be willing to let go of leaders who don’t live up to these values, as they will be the biggest detractors of a customer-centric culture.
Hiring good leaders is only one piece of the puzzle, however. The organization also has to incentivize and reward its customer-obsessed behavior. As the old saying goes, “Show me what the compensation is like, and I’ll tell you the behavior to expect.”
If you want to get a sense of how much customer obsession matters in your organization, look at the primary business metrics — especially those used to reward the tops executives. If your company only rewards based on shareholder return metrics (revenue, EBITDA, etc.), that is what they will work to maximize.
Likewise, if there are no metrics for measuring customer happiness — CSAT, Cust NPS scores, retention rates, or something similar — it shouldn’t be surprising when decisions get made that alienate customers.
I should say, too, that improving customer happiness metrics is a never-ending process. It’s not something you can do once and assume the organization will change. Nor can you simply aim for doing slightly better than the competition. Customer happiness is not a sprint; it’s a marathon.
This is the Foundation — So Don’t Settle!
If you want high growth with customer focus, your first step really needs to be getting the right people on board. The organization must hire and nurture execs who can reinforce the mission across the organization — and that includes having the right reward structure in place.
Once that leadership (and their incentive structure) is in place, it’s time to get a customer-obsessed structure in place. This means an investment in the right tools and skills to translate customer obsession into policies and actions. That will be the focus of part 2.
