Customer-oriented culture in a firm

Whenever I have asked CEOs to describe the kind of culture they would like to have, the most common answer is a customer-oriented culture or a performance-oriented culture. Part of developing this culture is putting into place a customer service strategy and hardwiring the processes.

There are five components to putting this into place - segmenting your customers intelligently, aligning customer interaction channels, the frequency of interaction, the customer facing processes, the customer facing organisation, and the technology that can automate these processes.

Segmenting your customer base goes beyond age and sex. Intelligent segmentation can look at professions, spend & loyalty patterns, and needs that are specific to their social, economic, personal networks and communities. This will allow you to prioritise your customers and determine who you want to most satisfy.

Understanding how your customer interacts is important. They can either interact from a sales or service standpoint. Firms have multiple channels that a customer can use, and channels are optimised for certain kinds of transactions. Also the optimum cost/transaction, and turn-around-time varies by channel type. For example low value customers hogging up teller lines or call centres limiting timely access to high value customers is a mismatch between segmentation and channel alignment. Ensure customer segments and channels are aligned.

Frequency of interaction is the next piece in the puzzle. Customer generally don't like to interact excessively either for sales or services. What's more important is the frequency is optimised for the right sales and service needs. For example having the customer call a call centre to check his/her balances when mobile banking could automatically send balances is an example of a more effective way of managing customer interaction frequency.

At the end of the day its all about processes. Sometimes there are too many processes, and sometimes too few. One needs to determine which processes are customer facing in nature and then prioritise. Let me give you an example. When you rent a car, what's more important to you is minimising the amount of time you stand in the line to get to the agent. You wouldn't mind a few extra minutes once you are at the agent. Identify customer facing processes that result in a negative or neutral impression, and re-engineer the process to make those interactions positive.

Processes are delivered by people. Ensuring that you have the right organisation structure, head count, competency are all key to ensuring process effectiveness. One of the things to think about in organisation structuring is to determine whether you want a product, channel or customer oriented structure.

Processes can be automated by technology. Technology that consistently works is easy to use and should ensure that it does not become overbearing to the customer.

At the end of the day, implementing a great customer service strategy and building a customer oriented culture comes down to choice. Which customers are you going to provide the best service levels, and which customer are you going to just be fair to. Implementing a great customer service strategy is more than just telling all your employees to smile!

The author is the managing director of Cedar Management Consulting International.