Being connected to the outside world and to your customers risks getting lost in the daily struggle of running a fast growing and scaling business. Many organisations see their growth stall or choose the wrong growth paths because of this disconnectedness. Getting seven elements in place ensures this vital outward connection.
Starting up the connection is easy
In the start up phase, most of the time a connection to customers is exactly what got the company going. The entrepreneurs have either experienced themselves a market inefficiency or unmet need, and have built their company on this.
Losing sight of the customer
When growth really sets in, it is easy to lose sight of the customers. Organisational issues like hiring and managing, process improvements or the external financing partners get all the attention. At the same time, competitors enter the market and draw attention, and new people join the organisation who do not have the entrepreneur’s conviction and experience with the unmet customer need that got them started. You start working in the company, and much less on the company.
With essential strategic and operational decisions to be made in this phase, staying connected to the always changing customers and other stakeholders in the market is as vital as ever. If you are going to ‘open the throttle’, you’d better be very clear on the key value you need to deliver in the eyes of your customers.
Keep customers at the centre of decision making
Learnings and insights from customers, suppliers, stakeholders, and others in the environment should shape the agenda of the organisation. That is the sustainable path forward to continuously creating new, more, and better value.
What are the key elements that make your company a Connected Company?
A culture focused on gaining insights and learnings from customers (and other stakeholders). How can you as leaders create such a culture? It’s simple: What conversations do you have amongst yourselves and with your associates? What questions do you ask? Are you meeting with customers yourselves? Do you ask everyone in your organisation to meet customers? Do you share customer feedback widely and regularly?
Build a Customer Insights Engine. Do you gather customer data and generate insights in a structural way? Do you have an expertise centre that gathers all qualitative and quantitative data, research, and behavioural practices with the tools (machine learning, AI, analytics) and knowledge to turn them into customer insights for everyone in the organisation to use?
A governance that allows people with customer knowledge to make decisions swiftly
Do you have a responsive way of working? Do you give those with constant and daily interactions with customers, those that best understand the needs, frustrations, and demands of customers — although sometimes lower in your hierarchy — a strong voice in the organisation? Do teams have the authority to make decisions on their own if they can increase customer satisfaction?
Are your associates empowered to make informed decisions on- the-go to adapt the generic value proposition to suit the individual needs or customer complaints? Your key value drivers defining your structure and processes.
- Is your organisational structure supporting the delivery of your value proposition? Does it build your differentiating capabilities? Does it allow for serving markets and customers whilst building functional expertise and exploiting scale? Did you find the balance between focus and scale? Are you clear where to focus and where to scale? Are you hopelessly decentralised, or mindlessly centralised?
- Are your processes efficient and effective to not waste scarce scale up resources to processes that do not add value for customers. Do you only accept complexity that the customer is willing to pay for?
Performance management
Are your Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) and Objectives and Key Results (OKRs) also customer-based, rather than only financially-based? Net Promoter Score (NPS), even with its limitations, is a key customer indicator, as are retention and churn rates, satisfaction scores, ticket volumes, and engagement metrics. Especially when adding the qualitative “Why?” or ”So what?” to these scores, they become a base for constant learning.
Creating your Connected Company is the result of a series of interventions that each reinforce themselves if well aligned. These interventions drive the collective behaviour in your organisation that grows into a habit and creates a customer-connected capability; an existential capability to stay relevant.
New market, new connection
A services company became very successful by focussing on a very specific customer segment, medical professionals, by offering a broad range of business services. After gaining a substantial market share in this segment, they wanted to grow to an adjacent market segment of professional self-employed nurses.
Instead of ‘getting out of the building’’ to speak with this group, they were set on entering this new segment based on the convictions and beliefs that had made them successful in their original segment. Discussions in the board revolved on what each thought or believed, not on what they knew, had data on, or had experienced.
By also connecting to this new market segment in various ways, they learned how different value drivers were important in this segment. Going out and talking at all business levels with new customers and listening to feedback from the new sales team eventually gave them the key understanding they needed to also be successful in the new market segment.
The implications
The newly gained insights sparked the board’s decision to set up a separate organisational unit in a separate part of the office building to create focus on this new market segment. The new working space was decorated with insights, quotes, pictures, and data of the new customer group and new information was added to this on a daily basis. This resulted in a highly practical customer insight engine.
Customers were given an active role: a forum of 200 customers made the final decision on the style and logo, instead of the management. Using the key services of the original organisation as a basis, a new layer of look-and-feel and value propositions was added. The organisation could hence leverage its scale for efficient back-office processes and still offer propositions tailored to this market segment.
Steering on community and engagement parameters, instead of sales, brought the right focus to this organisational unit and empowered it to make real-time decisions needed to facilitate this growth. Connections and co-operations with other players in this market segment allowed for further development and learning.
The board fostered this by actively holding back and stimulating this new unit to constantly gain insights by interacting with their customers, adapting to these insights, and learning by doing. This resulted in a highly active and engaged community of over 15,000 professional nurses within a year.