1. Goals — Sharing the Vision
- Why it matters: Goals set the stage for the way people think and do; hence, your company’s and your customers’ productivity, costs and goodwill are at stake.
2. Values — Walking the Talk
- What’s customer-centered: Customers’ well-being overarching your list of corporate values, and as the reality for what gets people ahead or not.
- Why it matters: Regardless or what you declare as your brand promises customers will see your company in terms of your people’s behaviors.
3. Structure — Nurturing the Ecosystem
- Why it matters: Outside-in must be through-and-through — not skin-deep — for your company to achieve its full potential.
4. Processes — Preventing Silos
- What’s customer-centered: Universality, collaboration and customer well-being built-in and audited regularly among all types of processes company-wide.
- Why it matters: Re-work, delays, scrap and morale costs for the company and for customers stem from processes out of sync with customer well-being.
5. Policies — Empowering Growth
- What’s customer-centered: Internal and external rules audited regularly for customer well-being in simplifying access and use of your offerings.
- Why it matters: Customers migrate to the path of least resistance; creating hassles for customers causes unnecessary costs and churn risks.
6. Motives — Driving Win-Win Attitudes
- What’s customer-centered: Rewarding prevention of hassles and creation of mutual value, both formally and informally, as top success criteria.
- Why it matters: Criteria for promotions, raises, hiring, bonuses, budget expansion and recognition drive behavior even more than goals and values.
7. Engagement — Collaborating for Results
- What’s customer-centered: Cross-functional teamwork in preventing recurrence of customers’ hassles and in creating mutual value.
- Why it matters: Having a hand in making the company popular is a higher purpose that unifies employees and propels their productivity and tenure.
8. Improvement — Preventing Issue Recurrence
- What’s customer-centered: Identifying and resolving patterns and root causes of value diminishers for the entire customer base’s well-being.
- Why it matters: Chronic issues drain your company’s and customers’ precious funds, resources and morale, with numerous negative ripple effects.
9. Innovation — Creating Mutual Value
- What’s customer-centered: Empowering customers to achieve their goals with greater satisfaction in a win-win approach.
- Why it matters: Value creation is the surest path to differentiation and ongoing growth.
10. Momentum — Embedding Within Your DNA
Centering your business on customers means nothing is done in a vacuum: customers’ realities are the context for everything everyone does. Customer-centered business means your rituals and decision-making honor customers’ realities and needs as the pathway to meeting the needs of every stakeholder: employees, investors, partners, community, etc. This puts the horse before the cart. Feed the hand that feeds you and you will be fed.
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