Futureproofing the Customer-Centric Organization (AMGT350)

Okay, welcome back to Volume two.

We're moving into, let me go back real quick.

So what I said, we would do is after looking

at the collaboration, we're going to look at the two

navigational tools that customer centric managers have and they're increasing

customer trust and innovation.

So let's take a look at increasing customer trust, which

is oh my gosh, right.

We you guys are probably so sick of hearing me

talk about trust.

But as leaders struggle to apply these customer centric principles

that we've been talking about in this class, um you

know, new problems pop up unanticipated technologies, pop up their

work roles change.

But if they can think of these two navigational tools

as kind of a road map, that's going to help

guide them through whatever happens in the economy, whatever disrupts

the economy, whatever type of technological changes happen, right.

If you guys, when you guys get shoot, I don't

want to get into strengths and weaknesses and opportunities and

threats. But these are these are types of things that

are going to happen from outside of the company that

we don't have control over, and that's going to happen

down the line, right?

But if but if leaders can use these two tools

as a road map, it will kind of help guide

them regardless of what changes happen.

Right? So the first of the two tools is maintaining

and increasing customer trust, just saying like, no matter what

changes out there in the economy, no matter what changes

about technology.

One of our first tools that we can always use

to better ourselves is to maintain and increase customer trust.

Um, so what does that look like Pierre produced in

community owned products are really thriving right now, right?

We're seeing a huge uptick in in uh products that

are are designed by customers, um that are owned by

the community.

And so the more we can build trust and collaborate

with those kinds of projects, the better the most forward

thinking businesses, right?

They're they're they're uh they're best attributes is to act

in the customers interests.

Okay? So if you can maintain that as like a

core value to say, hey, we have all these policies,

we have all these ideas on what we want to

do, but as long as you act in the customer's

interest, that's forward thinking and that's an attribute that we

want throughout our company, throughout the employees, throughout the culture,

in order to continue maintaining and increasing customer trust.

Um last but not least, the trust ability principles.

There's like the three trust ability principles.

First do things right, right, high quality, do it right.

The first time kind of thing.

Second, do the right thing, ethical side of things, and

then third be proactive, don't wait for people to complain.

Don't wait for people to have an issue with the

way that you're treating them like do things ahead of

time to really get on there to really increase their

trust before they even know there's a problem that's going

to go.

So so far, I'm going to bring up this image.

Actually, this is a good one that is about like,

So the left hand column here is what a trustworthy

company does, and being a trustworthy company is better than

not being trustworthy.

But then the right side is where we really want

to be as far as being a trustable company.

So on the left side, care, a trustworthy company carefully

follows the rules of law and trains people on ethics

ethical policies to ensure compliance.

Sounds great, right?

But a trustable company follows the golden rule towards customers

and builds a corporate culture around that principle, right?

Treat customers the way that you would want to be

treated the golden rule, A trustworthy company does what's best

for the customers whenever possible, balanced against the company's needs.

But a trustable company designs its business to ensure that

what's best for the customer is also financially best for

the company.

Okay, So it's a different way of approaching that idea.

Uh, third, a trustworthy company fulfils all its promises to

its customers and does what it says.

It will do efficiently.

Trustable company follows through on the spirit of what it

promises by proactively looking out for the customer's interest.

This is like when like this is when like somebody,

uh, man just think like if somebody sells you something

and then follows up a couple of days later and

says, you know what, There's this new technology out or

there was some update that was made and normally you

have to pay for it.

But you know, I just dealt with you the other

day and I'm looking out for your best interest.

So I'm going to provide this to you for free.

That's what a trustable company, it really does.

The 4th 1, they're trustworthy company manages and coordinates all

brand messaging to ensure a compelling and consistent story.

This is what I teach in principles of marketing classes,

but a trustable company recognizes that what people say about

the brand is much, much more important than what the

company says.

Okay, so it's again, it's it's getting, what do we

call that customer optimization?

Right? Getting making sure that the customers are saying good

things about us, that what we say is going to

be taken with a grain of salt by all customers.

But if we really want to build trust, we don't

need to be as focused on what we're saying.

But what customers are saying about us and about our

brand fifth, they're trustworthy company uses a loyalty program.

They look at churn reduction turnover and or uh wind

back initiatives to retain customers longer.

Right? And that's all sounds fine and dandy.

But a trustable company seeks to ensure that customers want

to remain loyal because they trust the company to act

in their best interests.

Not because of some loyalty program, but because when I'm

dealing with you as a business, I know that you

have my best interests in mind and so I don't

want to go anywhere else.

Last, trustworthy company focuses on quarterly profits as the most

important. They're looking at key performance indicators, right?

KPI S looking at profits, KPI S, that kind of

thing. A trustable company uses customer analytics, right?

We talked about that for a whole week to balance

the customer profits against changes in actual shareholder value.

So it's right.

Looking at, oh, when we treat our customers better, how

does that change our current profits?

And how does that add value?

Hopefully, to the shareholders.

So that's the trust side of things.

Now, let's talk about the innovation side of things.

And this is like doing a complete disservice to innovation.

I used to teach a class, uh, for three quarters

straight of innovation to, to get students and innovation degree,

but it's okay.

We're talking about just a microclimate here.

Innovation when it comes to using it as a tool

for managers in the customer centric organization.

Right? So this is the second tool that they have

at their disposal to future proof.

The company innovate innovate, innovate, right?

You must produce new ideas constantly.

Right? You can't just say, boy, we got this really

cool update to our product coming down the pipeline and

once that hits, oh man, things are gonna be so

sweet. Um You always have to be working on things

and and having new innovations coming down the pipeline, but

they've got to have real value for the customers.

Um I'm gonna I'm gonna throw Apple under the bus

here. I hate to do that because I love Apple.

But like, I've seen their latest uh commercials, ads on

on this video game I've been playing.

It's like, it keeps bombarding me with Apple imac uh

ads. And what did they do?

What was the big selling point?

Oh my gosh!

Colour choices.

I had an imac in college in 1999 and it

had six different color choices.

That's not value to customers anymore.

Right, come on.

So you've got to make sure that your new ideas

are all based around value for the customer.

Right. True Innovation.

And I started to get to this line a little

bit earlier.

True innovation really requires empathy.

Okay. It requires empathy of the customer.

We have to be able to see things from the

customer's perspective, right?

We have to see what it is that they actually

value in their life.

Building those those learning relationships that we've been talking about

is the best step to gaining that insight that you're

going to need to build products and build services that

we absolutely know the customer values.

Otherwise we're just guessing right.

If you have an R.

And D.

Department that sits in a room with a bunch of

smart people thinking that they're going to produce a new

product or service, they're just guessing that that's going to

be valuable to the customers.

But if we have good uh insights into the customer

and what they do right through all this customer analytics

and all the other like monitoring and data analytics that

we talked about previously.

We know what they want, we know what they're going

to value now.

We know what they're going to value in the future

and we can build products that we know are going

to work rather than what we think are going to

work secondly, when it comes innovation fail wisely okay, learn

from your failures, fail early, fail often, but always learn

from your failure.

Um it's best to fail with like pilot projects or

with a prototype, right?

You don't want to fail when you're like, oh, hey,

we made this complete change with our company and it

didn't work out very well.

Um it's best to take it in small steps, right?

But then learn from it.

Um I mentioned uh, the lean startup earlier by Air

Greece. Um, he has this term called minimal viable products

MVPs and oh my gosh, it's, it's such a phenomenal

read because he talks about his companies that have failed

because they spent so much time perfecting the product um,

before finally launching it and then they launched, it wasn't

exactly what the customer wanted.

So they tweak it and tweak it and tweak it.

So instead the lean startup, right?

Like lean manufacturing, the idea is like just come up

with a minimal viable product product that just barely works

for the customer and deliver some value, but then can

be tweaked and added on as it goes right?

So learn from your failures, learn from the customer, okay,

don't fail.

And then say, oh man, that pilot project didn't work.

We really screwed the pooch there.

No, put together pilot projects, Figure out what it is.

You learn from that and then apply it to future

projects, um, and future changes and you're going to be

in a great, great spot.

Too many companies just like try to avoid failure and

the good companies, the innovative companies know that failure is

part of the ball game.

Okay, let's talk about the role of corporate culture.

Then, um, again, culture is, it can be defined kind

of like culture is what people do, what employees do

when no one's looking, right?

And it's important to understand though, that a climate of

innovation starts with a culture of trust, right?

We're just talking about innovation.

And so right here the same culture that encourages trust

also encourages innovation.

It encourages adaptability.

That's what, that's the company that I want to work

for, right?

I want to work for a company where employees are

more likely to innovate and experiment because they trust each

other, right?

They're not like, oh boy, I don't really want to

help you with this because you're going to get all

the credit and then you might take my job or

get the promotion that I wanted.

There's got to be a culture of trust within the

organization so that people feel comfortable innovating, experimenting with each

other. Um are not experimenting with each other, creating experiences

experiments for the customer, trying to experiment with with with

new products, new services and and that's that's what trust

is all about.

If we don't have that missing, if we don't have

that ingredient, none of the rest of it works okay.

If we don't have a culture of trust, we're not

gonna be able to innovate, We're not going to be

able to adapt to what it is the customer wants,

right? Um And then it's also important to say that

the most innovative companies have a really strong corporate culture.

Okay? It's like innovation is a part of their core

values. They're they're they have like, people love to do

what they're doing okay.

There's got to be a balance between exploitation and exploration.

You can't just do one or the other.

You've got to balance those two things.

You have to have a balance between efficiency and innovation,

right? Like I used to tell my innovation students, like

if we're looking at like ways to get students to

class on time and I want to put jetpacks on

all of them.

That's very innovative, but it's not very efficient, right?

We've got to find a balance there.

Um And lastly hold onto a core set of values

while experimenting.

Okay, You have to hold some things tight there.

Um, let me end with this like the corporate culture

that's most likely to stimulate and encourage innovative ideas is

the one that tolerates dissent amongst its employees and it

celebrates respectful disagreements.

Okay. It's a culture which were employees trust each other.

They trust management, but they're able to disagree and they're

able to disagree respectfully.

And that's the culture that's really going to make this

customer centric company work.

Okay. That wraps it up in two volumes.

That's awesome.

I hope you guys enjoyed the lecture series.

I hope you guys found this last lecture series, um,

as a good wrap up.

And I'll look forward to seeing you again soon.

Futureproofing the Customer-Centric Organization (AMGT350) - vol. 2

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