What Really Gets in the Way of Consumer Centricity?
I've long wondered why, given that Market Research and Marketing been preaching customer-focus for decades, so often one experiences lousy customer experience - where people who you are paying to perform some kind of service behave like they couldn't care less.
Regardless of where you are in Europe (my stomping ground) it's something that is alarmingly prevalent: large companies, small ones, recently privatised or merged....
So what is it precisely that stops CEOs, CMOs, the people in charge from turning their organisation into a truly customer-centric one? Setting the various departments - sales, customer service, IT to name a few - with ambitious targets on customer satisfaction? Of putting the mantra of market research - consumer centricity - centre stage?
No study here, no piece of quant. research amongst 50 business leaders - just some observations based on 30 years of sporadic suffering.
1. When Colleagues Count More than Customers...
Question: how often have you experienced workers, co-workers even, seemingly more concerned about what their colleagues thought of them than any external customers?
Understandible, maybe: colleagues have the power to influence your life, your career progress, daily tasks - and they're likely to be there long after a pesky customer has disappeared.....
It's still a corrosive mindset: distracting from being truly externally facing, and encourages people to seek the niches, the mini-communities that will make their working days more pleasurable, and yes, comfortable.
The comfort zone should be one for customer use only ;)
2. Lack of Inspiring Customer Experience
How many departments, companies spend more time in meetings of one sort or other than actually with the customer? Lose touch with the customers myriad experience moments?
Discussing strategy - reviewing a dashboard, worrying about shifts however small in KPIs - worrying about re-organisational rumours, attending a town hall.... Much of this may be important stuff, but it's far from the moments of truth, the experiences end users have every second of a company's products or services, what non-users are saying.....the stuff which ultimately decides on corporate future well-being.
A clarion call? Well, yes - if you've shared customer experiences personally, are rewarded maybe for the number of days you were actually shadowing or executing a sales or customer service role, then maybe cultures would accelerate their trajectory to customer-centricity.
3. The Customer Wants Something That I Have.....
In the worst moments of customer rage, the pre-rant moments, it is seemingly about being at the wrong end of a power relationship: the supplier has the power to give you something you want or need and behaves accordingly. With arrogance.
Almost as if a monopoly situation existed - either said or implied, the message is clear: so you want to change supplier? Good luck, they're all pretty much the same.
"The customer needs to understand" is an expression I've heard often whispered not too quietly amongst front-line sales staff - it's us, of course, the buyers, who are too stupid to understand how some supplier system or software is best.....
The other factor I won't touch on here is employee satisfaction, which multiple studies have shown to correlate directly to customer satisfaction.
If employees are motivated through the range of options open to companies - career perspective, progress, rewards, recognition, freedom to execute - then customer satisfaction will likely rise. Big statement - love to hear from anyone particularly who has evidence against this.
What would change the above? Could us humble Market Researchers play a role? Some thoughts....
Without wishing to sound naive or idealistic, MR folk need to be more than a department conducting insight studies. Customer urgency needs promoting throughout the organisation - persuasively, engagingly, repeatedly. MR is more than a discipline...it's a mantra, however heavily legacy perceptions may weigh.
MR messages, reports, toplines gain weight when they permeate organisations: everybody needs to know key drivers amongst key segments, for example, results of a conjoint study, the recommended actions. Top management comes to expect the MR POV.
Upweighting face-time dedicated to the conveying of insights is also key: cross-disciplinary workshops with action-and-next-steps built in have more lasting impact than a standard presentation.
Presenting results with as much real-life, ethnographic material as possible is another fillip to involvement and MR repositioning. If experience first hand isn't possible, then the substitutes should be raw rather than pale.
Getting marketing people directly into contact with the daily lives of their end customers is another way of upping the emotional impact of "research". Beats a spreadsheet to inspire action.
Organisationl models that place researchers within operational teams offer advantages: being closer to the hard-end of business, where tactics, trade negotionations, supply side issues and or customer service feedback impact daily.
There's one last thing: if we all aimed to improve participant experience in every study we execute we'd likely help create a positive loop, generate positive WOM about MR. Make it fun, involving, rewarding, interactive. DIY or not, there are still way to many surveys out there that damage the reputation of the MR industry as a whole.
Way to go, lots of onus on clientside researchers - but probably still lots of room to make our weight felt positively and insistently if we see ourselves in a people understanding business rather than part of a game of numbers or algorithms.
Curious, as ever, as to others' views.