Research Live published an article written by FlexMR’s CEO Paul Hudson, discussing the elements required for businesses to undertake true customer-led transformation. Entitled, 7 Core Ingredients to Creating Customer-led Transformation, this article is a guide for business stakeholders and insight experts alike who are aware of the challenges to the implementation of Customer Salience strategies, and which aspects to focus on first.
The Core Ingredients to Customer-Led Transformation
A customer transformation programme has one goal: to increase Customer Salience within an organisation. To do that, Paul states that "we need to make a deliberate plan to build awareness, influence key people, increase collaboration, break down barriers and increase ways for people to connect with customers." In all, there are seven key ingredients to a successful programme:
1. Building awareness and understanding - every programme needs to win hearts and minds if it is to influence action. It is central to our purpose, that we communicate and amplify the voice of customers across the organisation.
2. Operating at different levels - how to influence all decisions, not just a handful. To achieve this, we must move away from a mindset that solely focusses on ‘having a seat at the top table’ and having a ‘seat at many tables’.
3. Breaking departmental silos - one of the bigger barriers to using customer insight effectively in decision-making processes is the way the stakeholder organisation is structured. More often than not, organisational charts have linear hierarchies and departments and teams that are super focussed on executing a specific function or process - good in some cases, but not for Customer Salience.
4. Drawing-in other data points - usually, there are already lots of data points and ways that the customer voice can be heard, already, in the organisation. The role of a good Customer Transformation programme is to bring all of that data into play and to facilitate its use and exchange.
5. Identifying and building influencers - A successful Customer Transformation programme needs insight advocates, champions and influencers. These people help motivate stakeholders, amplifying the message and engaging the audience on behalf of the insight team.
6. Creating opportunities for collaboration - Opportunities for discussion and collaboration are critical for success. A programme only becomes effective at embedding customer-thinking into decisions IF stakeholders can bring to mind key pieces of knowledge at the point they are making a decision.
7. Building opportunities to connect with customers - The aim of a customer-transformation programme is to rewire the organisation to think more like a customer. To aid this people should be given the opportunity to directly connect or meet or see customers, so they can understand and feel their needs and emotions.
Paul brings the article to a close by mentioning that "Customer Salience isn’t just an awareness of customers. It’s the ability for decision-makers to bring customers to mind at the point they make a decision. It is an act of influence; an action. It cannot be passive. This approach changes any normal customer research and insight project from being a passive set of recommendations or discrete data points, into being a verb, an ability to do, to act and decide based on our collective understanding."
Read the full article on Research Live to learn more about the 7 ingredients to customer-led transformation now.
About Research Live
Research Live is the world's leading source of industry news, opinion, special reports and feature articles for market and social researchers, data analysts and consumer insight professionals. Covering the latest trends and techniques from behavioural economics to big data analytics, as well as hot topics like polling and privacy. The publication is operated by the Market Research Society.
