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The challenge I see with many companies I work with is aligning their customer goals into actions across their business to create a culture of customer-centricity.
The heart of customer-centricity is putting the customer at the centre of the businesses decision-making to all work together for the good of the customer.
Whist getting marketing, sales, operations, finance and HR to all work together looks good on paper, if the organisational culture is geared for siloed decision-making, working together to improving customer experience can cause organisational pain.
My #GrowthHack this week is how Marketing, as the customer custodian, needs to spend just as much time ‘marketing-it internally’ as they do externally to shift the business culture to customer-centric.
I was fortunate to be a moderator for one of the round table discussions for the CMO Magazine Momentum Conference on fostering creativity and curiosity.
One of the discussions turned to changing the customer conversation internally and Fairfax’s CMO remarked, ‘we’ve coined the phrase marketing-it internally’.
Now it’s not often I hear a marketer say this, and this is what it led me to believe that whilst we understand that good communication is central to customer-centricity, in reality, many companies are yet to formalize an internal ‘customer’ communications program.
So what might an internal ‘customer’ communications program look like? Simply put, it speaks to sharing information cross functionally; seeking ideas and input; understanding and working toward common customer goals.
‘Marketing-it internally’ will help to facilitate a better working relationship between siloed departments with a more consistent focus on the customer.
As a start here’s a couple of ideas for ‘marketing-it internally’ that will help cross-functional teams put your customer at the centre of their decision-making:
A Customer-Room is a physical representation of the customer journey and helps to tell the customer story visually from the customer’s point-of-view. Bringing the customer to life for non-customer facing staff promotes empathy and understanding.
The room can include journey-mapping artefacts, including personas, photos of interactions, quotes from qualitative research, customer feedback and recorded service calls.
If your business doesn’t have the space for a dedicated room, another approach I’ve used to ‘marketing-it internally’ was a life-size customer persona in meeting rooms. Another low cost but effective method is a dedicated customer-chair to symbolise the customer in internal meetings. Important here is to ask the question, what would our customer think of this decision?
As a follow up, in next week’s #GrowthHack I will discuss more ideas around ‘marketing-it internally’.
Master Customer Journey Mapping
My one-day intensive customer journey mapping workshops are designed to develop your skills in customer research based journey mapping.
The day focuses on developing customer-centric capability and cx tools that you can begin to apply immediately.
In the workshop you will learn how to identify your customers’ unmet needs; their frustrations, service gaps and what they value when interacting with your business.
Find out more about the workshop and how to reserve your seat HERE