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Co-authored by:
Jimmy James-Bergeron, Senior Director, Customer Transformatio
Caroline Giroux-Huppé, Associate Director, Customer Strategy & Innovation
Noémie Vallières, Associate Director, Customer Strategy & Innovation
Charles Blais-Fortin, Senior Consultant, Customer Strategy & Innovation
Caroline Colongo, Partner, Business Consulting
Organizations can enhance their customer-centricity by aligning their operating model with their customers' journeys.
In brief
- Aligning operations with customer journeys boosts customer-centricity, strengthens relationships and fosters growth.
- Embracing customer journeys aids in gaining insights, anticipating changes and fostering accountability, providing a competitive edge.
Customer-centricity and business architecture go hand in hand
All businesses strive to improve their customer service, but achieving true customer-centricity is not as easy as it seems. Complexity in internal processes, a lack of valuable customer data and issues with collaboration can hinder progress towards customer-focused goals. To navigate these challenges, focus on key outcomes through two essential steps:
Clarify roles and responsibilities
Understanding the roles and responsibilities of all individuals involved is crucial for achieving effective collaboration. Identifying the tasks and accountability of each role helps establish clear areas of responsibility and decision-making power. Common language and definitions are also vital to avoid miscommunication. By addressing these aspects, you can create a solid foundation for collaboration, efficient workflow and a shared sense of purpose among your stakeholders.
Map the collaboration model
To accurately assess the collaboration model, gather unbiased information on collaboration processes through various methods. Combining techniques like group discussions, workshops, interviews and surveys allows for a detailed view. Uncovering pain points and identifying leading practices across teams helps refine collaboration models and highlight areas for improvement.
Serving your clients starts by serving your employees
In the pursuit of excellent customer service, you must prioritize your employees. Consider these three steps to achieve future success through employee engagement:
Put people at the centre of strategic ideation
Encourage employees to imagine their roles and contributions in an ideal future state without constraints. This collaborative exercise helps foster reflection and creativity while considering individual and collective benefits. Presenting each employee's vision to others promotes feedback, synergy and team-wide socialization of role evolution.
Test ideas with real-world scenarios
After gathering employee ideas, it’s essential to apply them to existing constraints, biases and habits. Building and testing new models or processes through simulations and workshops allows for refinement and confirmation of roles and responsibilities. This process highlights inefficiencies and determines necessary transformations for reaching the ideal state.
Tailor future ideation activities to your workforce
Engaging employees in future state workshops requires creativity and an open mind. Employing gamification, role-playing, visual tools and other interactive methods sparks new solutions and fosters a desire for future responsibilities. Encouraging employees to distance themselves from current constraints enables fresh perspectives and imaginative thinking.
Clear accountability is key
To avoid inefficiencies and promote decision-making, you must establish clear accountability for customer experience and journey design. Documenting the entire process, creating design authorities and assigning specific ownership for journeys and their evolution fosters decision-making and prevents stagnation. Each member of the design authority should be responsible for specific expertise and held accountable for defined objectives.
By focusing on these key outcomes and supporting both customers and employees, you can achieve true customer-centricity and drive business growth.
It’s important for organizations to understand that aligning their operating model and the ways they work with their customers’ journeys can unlock their customer-centricity potential. The days of allocating resources to channels are over; long live the days of allocating towards customer journeys. Prioritizing customer journeys enables you to efficiently serve your customers at every stage, creating stronger connections and sustainable growth.
We found three fundamental takeaways leaders should consider when transforming and anchoring into customer journeys:
- Customer-centricity and business architecture go hand in hand.
- Serving your clients starts by serving your employees.
- Clear accountability is key.
By embracing customer journeys as a value enabler, you can gain insights, anticipate changes and foster accountability, ultimately leading to enhanced customer experiences and a competitive edge in the market. How you go about leading these transformations is a key differentiator.
Summary
Organizations should align their operating model with customer journeys for increased customer-centricity and growth. As per a Customer Transformation team study, the key steps include aligning customer-centricity with business architecture, serving clients through employees, and ensuring clear accountability. This involves clarifying roles and responsibilities, mapping the collaboration model, prioritizing employees, and testing new ideas. Focusing on these steps can lead to improved customer experiences, a competitive edge and business growth.