Customer-Centered Culture (C3™)

A common assumption about organizational improvement is that the use of new tools will achieve a competitive advantage. That has often lead to programs such as reengineering, TQM, benchmarking, cycle time reduction, customer relationship management, process improvement, and, most recently, Six Sigma. While each of these initiatives has offered value, the following are some of their most common weaknesses:

• Application is most relevant for manufacturing and production operations, difficult to apply to knowledge, service and creative work
• Little or nothing is done to help the alignment between organization strategy and customer priorities
• Significant implementation costs are incurred with no guarantee or limited evidence of ROCE or ROI
• Process improvement may occur without any measured impact on customer-desired outcomes, satisfaction or sustainable innovation
• New skills are acquired but no fundamental change in thinking, behavior or culture occurs.

Our second determinant, Customer-Centered Culture, is a framework for ensuring that the organization’s vision and desired outcomes are highly aligned with both internal and external customer outcomes and priorities. It also supports the rethinking/re-design of an organization’s policies, processes and products. Developed by Robin Lawton of International Management Technologies, C3 is a unique approach for delivering sustainable customer satisfaction. The C3 model helps organizations:

• Connect strategic vision to customer values.
• Determine what customers really want (not just what they expect).
• Measure the seemingly immeasurable (not just conduct surveys).
• Anticipate customer expectations, not just react and recover.
• Create what customers and employees never thought possible, and
• Align performance measures with customer priorities.

The C3 model is as relevant to a mining operation or refinery as it is to a consumer goods manufacturer, financial service or government agency.

How C3 Works

The starting assumption is that rapid cultural transformation becomes possible only when a new set of beliefs is adopted. The transformation is then sustained by using new measures of excellence. C3 tools help deploy and support the new culture.

C3 works first to change beliefs fast. Not many are eager to begin questioning or challenging closely held beliefs. These beliefs often include “vital lies” (i.e. assumptions that constrain change). So C3 uses a series of grounded workshops to examine the real, but often absurd, array of current organizational behavior.

The second step is to replace internally focused, producer-centered thinking with an alternative: customer-centered thinking. This is accomplished using a process of experiential discovery. It results in insights into the degree to which:

• customer priorities are really known (or unknown)
• performance measures address what customers care about most (or least)
• we understand who "the customer" really is
• strategic objectives are consistent with customer values
• the voice of the customer is anticipated, captured, understood and acted upon
• continuous improvement is mistaken for innovation (better candles vs. light bulbs)
• high leverage opportunities have been identified (vs. just low hanging fruit).

The above elements set the stage for product and process redesign – and for moving toward a customer centered culture.