The opinions expressed by Entrepreneur contributors are their own.
Many companies struggle to understand what it means to be a customer-centric organization. While it’s a somewhat amorphous concept, the most common definition is “putting the customer at the center of everything you do.” This idea is often translated into new policies, procedures and processes, all intended to establish a more customer-centric business. However, many of these efforts will fail.
In fact, according to McKinsey, approximately 70% of all customer-focused change initiatives are unsuccessful, not because of unclear direction but because of a lack of bottom-up support. Leaders continually overlook the power of culture and its gravitational pull to combat change.
A customer-centric culture cannot be achieved simply through consensus or mandate, especially if it only begins to increase sales and earnings per share: these are simply the result of an intrinsic behavioral change. Behaviors cannot change without all employees, management, executives and board members being aligned on why a customer-centric culture is good business.
A successful customer-centric behavior change strategy begins with understanding the change context—the pattern of influential factors that shape how change is perceived and adopted within the organization. While change contexts vary widely across organizations, leaders can benefit from recognizing their unique context, from which more personalized strategies can be built.
Related: 5 Reasons Why You Should Talk More, Especially If You’re a Younger Employee
For example, Company A might identify its organizational change context as strong in tactical execution but weak in strategic thinking, with one specific team – IT – having historically been the most resistant to change. Furthermore, it may determine that the sales team will likely be the first to adopt it and will strongly influence other departments.
Once the evolving context is defined, leaders must identify the positives and negatives, where barriers and benefits to adopting customer-centric change may occur. This includes identifying customer-centric change behaviors, catalysts and inhibitors.
Behaviors they are actions and behaviors that could support or derail your customer-centric end state. Catalysts positively influence these behaviors, from incentives to processes to make it easier for employees to perform customer-focused tasks more effectively. Inhibitors include those elements that create resistance to change, be it social, operational or cultural.
Behaviors aligned with customer-focused goals may include customer service team members staying on the phone to ensure a customer issue is resolved rather than attempting to meet call time metrics, or an individual employee sending out business cards. handwritten thanks to assigned customers. Catalysts could include customer decision-making autonomy for individual departments or flexibility in spending on customer satisfaction. Inhibitors could range from a rigid organizational structure, a narrow compensation philosophy, or caustic leadership in key teams.
Related: One of the biggest mistakes aspiring entrepreneurs – and almost everyone – makes
Once these cultural influences are fully mapped, leaders can create tailored interventions to shift mindsets, eliminate inhibitors, reinforce aligned behaviors, and leverage change agents to introduce and shape new ones. These interventions should be articulated as part of a change philosophy that fits the context of organizational change. Depending on the context, interventions may include common elements such as rearchitecting the organizational structure or implementing new systems and tools to streamline customer interactions.
In this situation, Company A could create a series of behavioral and mindset interventions, including amplifying beneficial behaviors by publicly highlighting employees who demonstrate desired behaviors, recognizing teams across the organization who create new ideas that align with the customer-centric vision and reshape the company. social network to connect distinct individuals and groups around mutually beneficial goals or ideas.
Related: Your differentiators suck. Follow these 5 steps to stand out from the competition.
Once leaders have broadened their vision of possible change, they can better design and use more diverse interventions. This can be supported through cross-sector research to identify relevant precedents and creative interventions rather than relying solely on personal experience.
Until new behaviors and mindsets are ingrained in the organization’s social norms, they will be subject to degradation. Interventions increase employee interest and ability to accept and implement customer-focused change.