Why Bring Customers to the Table to Co-create Strategy

Why battle to improve the customer experience through strategy alone when your people will have ignored most of what’s required at the implementation stage?

Organizations must continually align themselves with customers in order remain relevant. The organization can know its customers through daily interactions, social media, research and so on, and strategy plays a key role in helping align the organization with customers. But every customer is unique and every supplier/customer interaction is also unique. This means the organization’s staff continually face the complexity of delivering the tasks in front of them (usually internal process-driven activities) while making things work for the customer. This creates ambiguity about what to deliver.

Inevitably, the pressure of internal processes lessens efforts at client experience delivery and customer service quality is uneven at best. When the service delivered is complex and open to varied interpretation, the quality of customer service faces considerable pressure. As quality decreases, the pressure from customers, i.e., complaints, increases. Unfortunately, the expense of this lack of efficiency and productivity goes unnoticed.

• Be seen to be listening actively to the customer across the organization
• Create a collective awareness and understanding of the value of act of listening to the customer
• Speed up the process by bringing staff and customers together during the planning – bring customers in the room!
• Listen actively to the customer, treat them like an expert in their lives, learn their language, and notice that their demands are almost always reasonable (vs. noticing the ‘complaining customer’ which gets the most attention, but creates little change)

The visceral experience of interacting collectively with customers is transformational. Have customers explain their needs and the experience they want and alignment will begin

Combined this with social media as an interactive customer dialogue tool and organizational change speeds up. Transformation happens when we bring the customer to the table, ask better questions and make change plans right away.

Questions to ask during planning

The solution focus model for asking better questions