Making direct contact with customers, regularly. When leaders are truly committed to being more customer-centric, they will demand more voice-of-customer feedback. This might mean attending focus groups and research sessions personally, or interviewing customers directly. It could involve mystery shopping their firm, and their competitors’ firms. At one company I’ve worked with, a random half-hour of inbound customer calls to the company’s call center is recorded every day, then copied and distributed on a daily basis to the company’s top leaders, so they themselves can listen directly to what customers are saying, while they’re driving to or from work.

Accumulating expertise in customer centricity. Leaders committed to more customer-oriented practices at a firm will do things like attending conferences and training sessions, benchmarking with customer-centric firms, and sharing best practices with other business units or affiliated companies. If I see leaders setting up and participating in customer-oriented orientation and training programs for employees, I know their commitment to the their company’s transformation is genuine.

Crossing boundaries to generate enterprise-wide results. Organizational silos are anathema when it comes to customer centricity, so leaders who are committed to more customer-centric practices will spend the time and effort necessary to break them down. But even when these barriers persist, committed leaders will do their best to ensure that each customer has an experience that is consistent across all products and channels. Leaders who are committed to a customer-centric transformation will make it their business to sponsor cross-departmental initiatives aimed at eliminating inconsistencies and sharing best practices.

Measuring success differently. Crossing boundaries can only be effective over the long term if new metrics and reward structures are also introduced, including things like customer satisfaction scores and NPS. The benefits of providing better customer service or generating higher customer satisfaction often don’t translate into sales and profit in the current financial period, so when a firm’s incentive compensation plans are based solely on financial performance, I know the firm’s leaders aren’t truly committed to customer centricity at all. They may consider it nice to have, but not essential. My own parent company, TeleTech, has been contracted by one of the large technology companies (which I’m not allowed to name) to help stimulate sales by supplementing this company’s own inbound and outbound contact center resources. But the primary metric for our success in this contract isn’t sales volume, it's customer satisfaction! This client’s leaders are authentically committed to customer-centricity.

Focusing on incremental progress and “quick wins.” A large part of change management involves accumulating small successes, celebrating them, and building gradual organizational momentum toward the change required. Our consultants know that to be successful a company’s leaders must not be so consumed with the ultimate destination that they can’t pay attention to fixing small problems, getting bite-sized projects off the ground, and piloting a variety of customer-centric initiatives in different areas, simultaneously. The competitive world changes too quickly to wait for perfect solutions. But over time, small efforts, limited-scope projects, quick wins and even “near misses” all add to the momentum, making more comprehensive approaches easier to attempt, justify, and implement, and building support for the direction of change within the rank-and-file.

Communicating and living by customer-centric values. Does your executive team “walk the walk” or just “talk the talk” of customer-centricity? A committed leader finds opportunities to discuss with staff members how the company should treat certain types of customers, perhaps focusing on particular lifestyles, transaction patterns, or just simple demographics. He or she will place greater emphasis on initiatives designed to improve the different customer experiences among a variety of different types of customers. And a leader committed to customer centricity will also be committed to transparency and trustability – ensuring that the organization’s official policy is always to act in the customer’s interest, even when it might not yield the same level of short-term profit.

It's not just about your product or service. Customers want you to be the type of person they can trust to get the job done.

What do your customers really want from you? No matter what your industry, your customers want more than just great products and workable solutions.

What they really want to know is that you--personally--are the type of person whom they can trust to get the job done.  Here are the seven things they want to see in you:

1. Independent Thinking

Customers want to know that you'll represent their interests, even it's not in your own financial interest--and particularly when the proverbial chips are down. (Of course, it's your job to make certain that the chips stay up.)

2. Courage

Customers want to know that you can be trusted to do the right thing. They expect you to tell them if buying what you're selling is a mistake, or not truly in their interests.  That takes real guts.

3. Pride

The best customers don't want you to truckle and beg. Because they're trusting you to deliver, they want to work with proud, successful people who can handle even the most difficult tasks.

4. Creativity

Customers don't have the time to sit and listen to cookie-cutter sales presentations.  However, they always have time for somebody who can redefine problems and devise workable solutions.

5. Confidence

Customers are taking a risk when they buy from you.  They both need and expect you to exude the kind of confidence that assures them you'll do what it takes to make them happy.

6. Empathy

Customers want you to see the situation from their perspective.  They want you to understand where they are, how their business works, and the challenges that they face--not just intellectually, but in your gut.

7. Honesty

Above all, customers want you to be honest with them.  In fact, the previous six values are built upon a foundation of honesty.  Without honesty, you have absolutely nothing to offer any customer.

One of my observations about many organizations that I work with today is that many employees are so busy trying to survive organizationally that they have no time to contribute to the bottom line.

What we typically do is look to see what the people in management or leadership are doing and try to emulate them assuming that if those behaviors made them successful, those same behaviors will make us successful.

What this results in in some organizations is what I call "perpetuation of stupidity". If we have poor role models who are in upper management, we will begin to emulate those poor behaviors and those behaviors perpetuate themselves over time. Some of these poor behaviors come to us because of assumptions that managers hold.

The first is the assumption is that customer service is a strategic edge. In reality it is not customer service but rather service. There is a important difference. One of the reasons many organizations are in so much trouble is that they have lost all sense of the service ethic. As a matter of fact, the phrase customer service suggests unless somebody is a customer they do not deserved to be served. Therefore we are not tuned into to servicing co-workers, to servicing employees, to serving managers, to serving vendors or simply serving the people that we live with each day.

This loss of the service ethic has transformed all the way to the customer.

The people we should be focused on servicing are the people in the next step in the process. You have to ask yourself "Who is it I've been employed to serve?" The heart of service is what drives (or breaks down) relationship building.

Customer service should not be the objective, but it should be to better serve the people we work and live with.

The second assumption is we are smarter than our customers. We think because we are in a particular business we know what our customers need better than what they do. This happens a lot when your customers are internal customer within the organization.

Quality and service are what the customer says they are!

The next assumption is that people should conform to the system. The reality is that the system should almost always conform to the people.

When a crafts-person uses a tool, their using that tool to leverage their knowledge and their skill. It would be ludicrous to think that if the tool changed that the craftsman would have to adjust their knowledge and skill to tool, rather progress is always dependent upon the tools conforming to help the crafts-person. The problem is organizationally we create systems and when those systems do not work and do not support the people who work in the system, we demand that the people change.

In mental health the first sign of mental illness is rigidity of thinking. The first sign of organizational illness is rigidity of systems, telling people that the systems are locked into place, that they cannot be changed or improved to better the skills of the people that work their.

Make sure your systems are conforming to the customer (internal and external) rather than your customer conforming to the systems.

Do your systems truly leverage the knowledge and skills of the craftspeople within your organization?

http://itunes.apple.com/au/book/key-leadership/id497320914?mt=11