For businesses to protect margin and grow revenue in the future, a focus on customers is more crucial than ever before. This is Customer Obsession – a fixation to drive strategy and actions that deliver greater value for the customer by embedding the customer’s real perspectives at the heart of a company.
In a world where change is the only constant, customers have an ever increasing number of brands to choose from. At the same time, what that brand means to a person continually shifts and evolves as their needs constantly change. It is only the brands that authentically deliver what customers truly need or desire that will succeed and endure. Businesses need visionaries who can deeply understand their customers’ moods and minds on a human level in order to deliver true customer value. It is these visionaries who are able to develop the type of emotional customer connections that form and strengthen mutual and personal relationships, creating a type of engagement through which change can flow more easily.
Why customer obsession is important
- Only when leaders understand the humanity of customers as real people, can teams provide greater value for them.
- Customer obsession can help focus a product or service business to deliver differentiation that customers value, to drive engagement, boost retention and protect margin, but while this differentiation should flex, purpose endures.
Key leadership characteristics for delivering customer obsession
- It takes a blend of empathy, determination and humility to create learning collaborations, and a true service mindset to be a customer obsessed leader.
What leaders can do to create customer obsession
- Define the purpose and culture for customer value
- Set objectives which create customer value
- Set strategy for what customers feel, not just what they do
- Fuse customer data and human insights together
- Champion customers in boardrooms and across organisations
- Develop customer obsessed people and teams
- Have a growth mindset of learning and customer curiosity
- Create a culture of collaboration, not just tokenism, from multi-functional teams
Businesses who think they are customer centric but don’t behave that way by living through their values will inevitably over time erode their advantage.
