While many companies claim to focus on customers, closer inspection shows their focus remains on serving themselves. Most businesses are task-focused and "customer service improvement" typically just involves superficial training programs. True customer focus requires massive cultural transformation to ensure people are empowered and motivated to enhance the total customer experience. This includes aligning goals, values, systems, processes and structure around customer focus. Developing and implementing cultural transformation is one of the hardest tasks for an organization and requires careful planning to avoid common pitfalls.

1. BRINGING TRUE CUSTOMER FOCUS IN TO REALITY
In spite of all the catchy slogans and corporate pledges, customer service levels of
major corporations have only slightly improved in the last few years.
Customer focus graphSome observers maintain that they haven’t moved at
all, or have even worsened. Virtually all organisations today claim that they’re in the
business of serving customers—but closer inspection makes clear that their focus
remains on serving themselves.
Most businesses are consumed by
task-focus; all reference to “customer service improvement” is superficial, and
typically involves introducing training programs whose primary function is to
legislate behavior change among employees—what workers derisively refer to as
“smile training.”
Most senior managers are not even acquainted with what a
customer-focused culture even looks like, and are not ready to turn their own
business culture inside out in order to cultivate such a focus.

2. By comparison, those organisations that make customer delight a core
element—or even the main driver—of their strategic focus will have been through
massive cultural transformation to ensure that at the customer interface, their
people are empowered, equipped, and motivated to do whatever they must to
enhance the total customer experience.
The key elements in this kind of cultural transformation are alignment of
shared goals, company values, systems and processes, and organisational structure.
The dual objective of this kind of cultural alignment is organisational effectiveness
(doing the right things) and efficiency (doing the right things right.)
A somewhat different philosophy is summarized on a colleague’s coffee mug:
Drink coffee, do stupid things with more energy and faster. In the face of cultural
misalignment, drinking more coffee may help mask the reality that little of what you
do will be adding much value from the customer’s perspective.
People are at the heart of any cultural transformation. Whilst a company’s
success clearly depends upon its people, their collective power stems, in part, from
the organisation’s ability to point them in a common direction—a shared “sense of
purpose”—and its ability to eliminate obstacles and impediments to progress. When
the organisation’s workforce and culture are aligned with its strategic focus, people
become a major source of sustainable competitive advantage.
In an effective organisational culture, systems and processes should follow,
serve, and support—rather than control, direct, and dictate. Central to cultural
alignment is the question, “For whose convenience is this system or process
designed?” The Organisation’s structure, as well as its systems and processes,
provide a clear indication of management’s true values (regardless how they may be
described in Annual Reports).
Arguments rage about the extent to which operational excellence drives
down costs, or whether customers any longer even have a requirement for greater
levels of service excellence. Studies have shown that between 20-40 percent of the
operating costs for most North American organisations are consumed by poor
quality.

3. This includes redoing work, processing warranty claims, handling disgruntled
customers or employees, scrapping defective materials…in other words, fixing things
that weren’t done right the first time.
The principle of alignment embraces the principle of getting things right first
time and doing only those things that add value for the customer, and thus by
definition, drive down the costs of doing business.
Although operational excellence can drive down cost, many cost-focused
organisations are not close enough to their customers to know that despite lower
costs, their products or services are missing the mark. It means not only are great
revenue opportunities lost, but also millions of dollars are wasted delivering or
supporting products or services that customers no longer perceive as useful or
relevant.
A large (and growing) number of executives and managers now recognize
that the quality of their future will be a direct reflection of the quality of the
products and services their organization delivers.
Developing and implementing cultural transformation is one the hardest
tasks that any organisation can undertake. When it comes to implementation there
are hundreds of ways to do it wrong: omit the senior executives from the planning,
disseminate a drab mission statement, neglect the customer during the change
process, mandate data collection but not data analysis, keep employees in the dark
about what’s happening etc. Only through careful and thoughtful planning can these
hazards be avoided.