Among the most frustrating parts of bad customer experiences is being unable to reach other customers and alert them to rotten company behavior. This blog is dedicated to giving customers a voice—and a loud voice.

About Dick Lee
In addition to twenty-plus years of consulting experience, customer-centricity and CRM consultant Dick Lee has written several books, authored over a hundred web and print articles and presented workshops worldwide. Dick is a CRMGuru.com Advisory Council panelist and was recently named one of the 20 most influential global figures in CRM.

As those of you who’ve read previos blog entries know, the new customer service culture at consumer electronics behemoth Best Buy has really rung my bell. But a recent incident has pushed me past being a happy, loyal customer into “outspoken advocate” territory. And it’s also created a striking comparison between BB and its leading U.S. competitor, Circuit City.

Here’s what happened. We recently had an excellent experience buying a home theatre set-up. But, as can happen, the audio system started experiencing power surges loud enough to wake up the dead. But they were very intermittent, and of course refused to happen when the service techs were there. But BB’s support folks checked everything possible. Unfortunately, they couldn’t find the source - which could have been the electrical feed, speaker feedback or the amplifier. So rather than argue that they had to find the problem first before going further, which we’ve come to expect, they just ripped out the amplifier and replaced it - including eating the cost differential between what they put in and what we bought, which they didn’t have in stock. That worked. We came out ahead of the game, with an upgraded amp. And BB came out ahead, because we’ll actively steer friends installing or upgrading home theatres to it, far erasing the deficit they ran sending service folks out several times and eating the replacement surcharge. That’s exactly how things should work.

And now for the comparison. BB just reported quarterly numbers - and profits are up dramatically, I believe because customers are attracted to the new BB experience. But Circuit City’s numbers are in the toilet. So what does CC do about it, aside from closing stores? Unbelievably, CC is cutting its experienced sales staff members, who are “getting paid too much,” and replacing them with inexperienced “cheap labor.” Exactly the opposite of BB’s successful strategy.

Remember the song, “When will they ever learn?”

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What’s the first thing that crosses a CXO mind, when he or she hears “customer-centricity” bandied about? For many execs, it’s “increased cost.” You betcha. “Gotta have so many mignions attending to so many needy customers that we’ll never post a profit increase.” And if you think about it, makes sense to frame customer-centricity this way.

But it’s wrong. Dead wrong. Wrong because, paradoxically, giving customers more of what they want requires fewer employees, rather than more employees. And managing head count is almost always the pillar of cost control.

Hopefully, now you’re really scratching your head. “How do we get to taking better care of customers by reducing head count?” Actually, by applying a fundamental business principle championed by folks including Jack Welch, Peter Drucker and damn near every organizational consultant on the planet.

Some, including Welch, call this principle “delayering.” At High-Yield Methods, we call it “rationalizing work” (to make sure everything adds value to customers). But whatever the name, it requires reducing “supervisory” layers to a bare minimum. And perhaps the most essential element of delayering is trusting and empowering line employees to make decisions without supervisory oversight (read “interference”).

Now here’s where good organizational strategy meets customer-centricity. Aside from quality products (which includes more than a dollop of service quality), what does research show to be customers’ highest priority? Dealing with empowered employees. Voila.

In a nutshell, delayering the organizational structure, which results in substantial cost reductions, doesn’t just work for companies. It works for customers as well. We rediscover this principle from the opposite direction virtually every time we reengineer business process. When we rationalize process to eliminate activity that doesn’t add value to customers, we very quickly come down to delayering. So in this case, doesn’t matter whether you start from a customer-centrric point of view or the customer perspective. You reach the same end point. Which doesn’t happen very often. Which is also why it’s so unexpected. Which makes it a paradox.

So next time you hear “customer-centricity” and “cost-control” used in the same breath, don’t belch.

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�??The devil is in the details�?? must be among the most overused phrases in the English language. But only because it�?Ts so true. And the phrase aptly describes five �??little things�?? companies can do to accomplish much better corporate alignment with customers.

Now, I must forewarn you that these deeds may not seem so small to you. However, I describe them in the diminutive because the majority of companies claiming progress towards aligning strategy with customers, process with strategy and technology with process routinely brush them off as inconsequential factors. But if your company takes these five steps, you�?Tll likely leapfrog over competitors that have been at the customer-alignment game much longer than you.

1.�������� While engaged in strategic planning, let your �??inner customer�?? drive your agenda:�� The purpose of customer alignment is to create new value for customers in ways that will add new value back to the company. But most of us start the planning process with unconsciously self-serving perspectives regarding what customers want and what will trigger their buying from you (the concept that �??brand�?? delivers value to customers is one hideous example). Consequently, we do a lousy job exploring ways to add new value to customers, followed by a superb job of exploring ways customers can deliver new value back to us. The antidote? Come to planning sessions pretending you�?Tre your own customer and, as a customer, tell your company what to do and how to do it to win and keep your business. Nothing more than role-playing, really. But devastatingly effective when done right. In fact, when we facilitate Hyper-planning sessions, we start off playing the customer role, which many groups initially view as adversarial until they start �??hearing�?? the customer, and they join in.

2.�������� When redesigning business process to align with customer-centric strategies, ignore process efficiency completely.�� You�?Tll be amazed at what happens. If you focus process design around efficiency, you�?Tll certainly achieve some, chipping away at process defects here and there. But if you focus on adding value to customers with each activity, step and task, instead of chipping away at process defects you�?Tll wash away entire flows and processes �?’ and often eliminate layers of supervision that interfere with empowerment of customer-facing employees. This outcome occurs because almost every company�?Ts processes are designed from a functional silo perspective with self-justification in mind. But when we strip away work that�?Ts not adding value, we achieve much greater efficiencies than by trying to be efficient.
3.�������� When analyzing and designing your business process, uncouple workflow from work process and couple workflow and information flow.�� These are the roots of our Visual Workflow approach to process design. In a variable work (non-manufacturing) environment, workflow - how work moves from function to function or stakeholder to stakeholder - is joined at the hip with information flow. Unfortunately, manufacturing-based process approaches such as Six Sigma and Lean don�?Tt consider information flow until after the fact, if at all, which obscures scads of opportunities to add value to customers by better synchronizing workflow and information flow and by implementing a whole range of automation support tools. And in a variable environment, work process - which is how individuals do their work �?’ is totally subordinate to workflow, whereas Six Sigma in particular starts at the wok process level. That�?Ts putting the cart ahead of the horse in CRM.
4.�������� When selecting any type of automation technology, especially CRM software, map your workflow and work process and make vendors demonstrate their level of support.�� Of, how most vendors like to come in to snow potential customers with dog and pony shows, bells and whistles demonstrations and only tangential treatment of customer requirements. Actually, an advance hint as to how well you�?Tll work with a vendor is how well it responds to receiving your �??process book�?? with instructions to demonstrate what you want to see. Good vendors will appreciate your specificity (which may warn them off pitching business they can�?Tt or shouldn�?Tt win), while others will bob and weave and even tell you their software will �??adapt to anything.�?? I only know two top quality CRM packages that bear any resemblance to silly putty, and even these have limitations and boundaries.
5.�������� Before you make major changes, develop a comprehensive project plan and load it on a professional project management tool. ��Customer alignment itself isn�?Tt a project, it has no end. And many companies and consultants as well use that as an excuse for using �??project management light�?? when aligning with customers or implementing CRM. But the initial implementation of customer-alignment principles is a massive project affecting the majority of most companies. The stronger your project management approach, the more likely you are to succeed. And you should manage your project using an automation tool powerful and sophisticated enough to keep you and key managers on top of everything all the time. We use Ace Project out of Quebec �?’ a hosted solution �?’ but there other options as well. Unfortunately, none of these options go by the name �??Microsoft Project,�?? which is a dinosaur of the tallest order.
That�?Ts it. �??Five easy pieces.�?? You can do them, and you really should.

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CRM attracts big thinkers – people attracted to “big change.” So we shouldn’t be surprised that drilling down into minutia doesn’t rank high on most CRM folks’ hit lists. However, as companies realize that customers are demanding more and more employee empowerment, that customers are getting pickier and pickier about how, when and what we communicate to them, and that large buyers are starting to influence or even control production and delivery schedules  – the need to get elbow deep in managing messy details increases from several perspectives.

First, companies can’t empower employees without incurring more risk. Hence, empowerment must be accompanied by risk management, which must be provided by carefully scripted logic built into our automation tools. And this stuff can get more than a little complex, as in the case of bank lending officers who need a carefully crafted framework from which they can make variable decisions without crossing over into high risk territory. Far from “making it up as they go along,” loan officers have to process a range of inputs – including their intuitive sense of the customer – before flexing policies to accommodate individual cases without crossing the line. And if you want proof of that, just look at the mortgage industry today. What’s behind the mess there, other than greed? Lack of process control providing decision logic.

Have you ever tried to map a lending decision process? If you’re implementing CRM at a financial institution, you have no choice but to map it in order to mitigate risk. Despite the fact that mapping lending process  takes gobs of time and incredible attention to detail. But you can’t accurately map something this complex by lining a conference room’s walls with brown craft paper and drawing lines and boxes. Or even by skipping the paper routine and drawing boxes and lines in Visio. You really should use a decision mapping automation tool – which, unfortunately, many CRM practitioners don’t possess or even vaguely understand how to use.

Let’s keep the lending example and look at it from another angle. What if you’re approving credit online, without human intervention, where there’s risk of being either too stringent or not stringent enough? If you apply too restrictive standards, you risk alienating good customers. But if you’re too lax, you’ll wind up replicating the mortgage mess. To find a happy medium, you have to carefully prioritize and weight factors, a seemingly endless list of factors, which requires a “logic tree” than can span many, many pages of intricate process maps. Again, you can’t do it with brown paper (or flip charts) and magic markers – or with Visio. You virtually have to sit down at a computer with process automation software and carefully and methodically design the decision logic. Unfortunately, the more typical case is the business side handing IT some rough guidlines and saying, “Program it.” And then we wonder why we wind up denying credit to the credit-worthy while loaning big bucks to high risk customers.

But financial services is hardly the only business sector where CRM has to get “down and dirty” to support complex processes. Companies with high value customers that are trying to manage complex opt-in/opt-out scenarios with numerous “exceptions to the rules” have these issues. So do B2B companies forced by market conditions to manage complex pricing/discount schedules. As do MTO (make-to-order) manufacturers with defined capacity that have to allocate scarce resources among competing customers – and do it on a more thought-through level than “the squeaky wheel gets the grease” or “first in/first out.”

We could go on and on with examples. But bottom line, it’s time for CRM and CRM practitioners to start applying and automating sophisticated business rule sets – and start using much more sophisticated tools and approaches. Or more in the vernacular, “Slop time is over.” CRM has a growing number of serious responsibilities, and we’re all going to have to “get dirty” doing them.

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