Customer centric. It doesn’t mean what you think it means — Issue #6

I’ll admit I had to think hard whether to write on this topic, because it seems strange to me that it still so confusing to grasp.

I see so many consultancies stating that during digital transformation projects, they have a customer centric approach. Products boasting that their’s is the most customer centric product of its kind. Orgs building customer centric teams much like they build diversity and inclusion teams.

Everyone seems to be jumping on the bandwagon and exploring customer centricity which is incredible to hear after so many years advocating. So why visit the topic?

Fundamentally the big issue that most organisations don’t get is that it’s not a checkbox. It’s not just about using personas and talking to users. It’s not about always asking “what do our customers/users need?”. It’s not about hiring experts, hearing what they have to say and then going with what you want to build anyway with the comment “They don’t have all the context” or “They’re not considering the business impact.”

Being customer/user centered is more about the organisational culture. It’s about giving space for the experts to actually implement what they suggest. It may even be about initially affecting the business negatively in order to achieve an optimal experience for the customer/user.

However, saying that everyone is responsible for that customer/user centricity does not mean that everyone should talk to customers. It doesn’t mean that everyone can or should be an expert. It means recognising that it should be a consideration, but leave it to the experts.

It gets to me personally when everyone is suddenly scrambling to talk to customers. That will just create a mess.

Just because you’re more customer centric, doesn’t mean you’re actually customer centric.

Seems like an oxymoron, but the simple truth is that as a whole, our standards of what is considered being customer centric are very low, which means that we can proudly say we’re more customer centric than others and still fail strongly.

We should be accountable for bad experiences.

• Have I REALLY understood the user needs and expectations?
• How much bias was added to the rationale used?
• Did you get the insights from customers or did you use proxy customers? (ex. Internal “Experts”)
• Did you really understand the underlying needs and challenges or are you solving something that seemed obvious after a few hours of conversation/analysis? (Chances are, you’re adding a band-aid)
• How often do I use the terms “I know customers…” or “I think…”? You’re probably wrong.

Originally published at https://www.getrevue.co on February 23, 2022.