Challenge 10: Do you realistically support customer orientation?

Diagnosis

Innovation is based on bringing new and relevant value to your customers. They will be only willing to pay for your products if what you are offering aligns with their needs and preferences. Therefore ensuring customer focus in your organisation is critical for your company to succeed and survive in long-term. The most efficient solution and business processes will not give you benefits if they do not result in what customers are willing to pay for.

Positive aspects	Negative aspects
Importance of understanding and meeting customers needs is clearly communicated by the management.	Your company rarely seeks or considers customer feedback when decisions are made.
All employees participate in meetings, workshops and other activities where information about customers are shared and discussed.	Internal discussions, priorities, and goals consistently take precedence over customer considerations and customer needs.
Importance of accounting for customer needs in daily operations and innovation activities is communicated by multiple channels.	There is no space for personalising customer interactions, products, or services and employees lack authority to provide personal approach.
Company leaders are supportive to customer orientation and understand that it can be more relevant in the long-term than short-term financial metrics.	There is no system to understand customers retention and dropout rate.
We support our employees in developing empathy toward clients.	Quality of your products and/or services fluctuates not providing your customers constant value.
Employees are treated with respect when they advocate for customers, when decisions are made.	There is little to no engagement with customers through surveys, focus groups, or other interactions
Employees are empowered to take decisions when customer satisfaction is at stake.	User experience across different functions is not analysed.
In your company all teams collaborate to ensure seamless customers experience across functions.	Your company prioritizes short-term profits over building long-term customer relationships.
There are efficient channels for customer feedback and for employees to share customer feedback, insights, and suggestions for improving customer satisfaction.	Employees are not trained in understanding and meeting customer needs.
There are activities in place for continuous learning about customer behavior, needs, and industry trends to keep employees and executives informed and adaptable.	Customer feedback leads to little or no change in product/service offerings.

Actions for implementation

In this action you will engage with your team in mapping the customers experience to from one side get a full picture how customers are interacting with your processes and from the other to collect and share insights regarding customers from across your company. It will help everyone to better understand the customers and account for their needs across functions of your company.

1. Organise a session with involvement of employees across all functions. While the main objective is to build clear customer journey map for your company or a specific product, clearly state the purpose of the customer journey mapping exercise. Are you trying to identify pain points of your customers, improve specific touchpoints, or uncover opportunities for innovation?
2. Ask your employees to prepare - collecting data from various sources, such as customer feedback, surveys, interviews, social media, and customer support interactions. This information will help you build an accurate journey map.
3. Start the activity by defining a typical user of your product or service. Be detailed. You can ask your employees to define profile in groups and then present to identify differences in perception who our typical customer is. If you work with different segments focus initially on one type of a customer that you wish to focus on. After group presentation work together to refine specific profile that all participants will work on.
4. Identify all the touchpoints a customer has with your brand, both digital and physical. These could include website visits, social media interactions, in-store experiences, customer service calls, etc.
5. Create a timeline that spans from the customer's initial interaction with your brand to the end of their journey. This will be the horizontal axis of your map.
6. For each touchpoint, note down the emotions your customer might be feeling. This will help you understand how different interactions impact their overall experience.
7. Identify pain points, areas where customers face challenges, frustrations, or confusion. Note these on the journey map.
8. Look for opportunities to enhance the customer experience. Are there moments where you can surprise and delight customers or provide additional value?
9. Include internal processes that might affect the customer journey i.e. product development or quality control, even if customers aren't aware of them.
10. Create a visual representation of the customer journey using a diagramming tool, whiteboard, or pens and paper.
11. After initial map is drawn discuss its accuracy and adjustments with participants to try to reach the most adequate map.
12. Then, determine which pain points and opportunities are most critical and should be addressed first.
13. Develop action plans to address pain points and capitalize on opportunities. Assign responsibilities and set timelines for implementing improvements.You can run this exercise as a day activity or as a set of shorter sessions. But make sure that it takes place in a relatively short period of time – up to a week. Involve as many people as possible to gain multiple perspectives and insights.
14. The customer journey is dynamic. Regularly update the map as you gather more data and implement changes.
15. Ensure that your journey map aligns with your company's overall goals and vision.
16. Use visual elements such as color-coding, icons, and labels to make the map easy to understand and interpret and display and distribute it across your company. You can incorporate direct quotes from customers to add a human touch and reinforce the customer's perspective.