Becoming A Customer Focused Organization

"The customer is the sole reason organizations exist," Craig Cochran points out throughout this concise and practical book, which outlines the fundamentals of building process controls around internal and external customers' true needs. Cochran walks readers through a self-assessing customer focus inventory and from there explains how an organization can shape its processes to meet its customers' demands. Learn how to develop customer surveys that produce useful data for refining production and administrative processes. Understand the importance of customer-satisfaction training. Motivate top management to instill a customer-focused orientation throughout the organization. -- From publisher's description.

Differentiate your business by sharpening your Customer Focus or risk giving your competitors a competitive advantage.The-best-of-the-best do this. They know that the only long-term strategy that effectively creates customer loyalty, long-term profitability and which strengthens both internal service performance and productivity is a Customer-Focused strategy.This outstanding book explains what it takes to become truly Customer-Focused. It provides detailed, step-by-step instructions on what you need to do to create customer focus throughout your entire organization. We describe in detail, 12 proven 'best practices' strategies which you can learn from and use to create your own customer focus strategy and implementation plan. This book contains over 200 pages of detailed explanations, real world examples, stories and case studies as well as exercises and worksheets which have been designed to help you achieve greater customer focus in your organization, company, department or team.

In The Focused Organization Antonio Nieto-Rodriguez shows you how fewer, more effectively elected and managed projects are the key to strategic and long-term success. Using his own research and work experience he explains how and why those organizations that focus on just a few key initiatives can perform significantly better than unfocused organizations, not only financially but also in achieving their strategic objectives and motivating their staff. The author introduces a new way of looking at a company through two very different and often conflicting dimensions: running-the-business and changing-the-business. What you add to one dimension you have to subtract from the other one. Finding the right balance between these two dimensions represents one of the major challenges to successful strategy execution. Becoming a focused organization involves a radical change in the way companies are organized and the way they select and manage projects - the creation of a new culture. The Focused Organization discusses the characteristics that comprise a focused organization. It describes key areas where a focused organization builds its levels of maturity; provides examples of focused organizations that outperform the rest; and explains in practical steps how all enterprises can become focused. The book finishes with a unique and inspiring case study that transports us to the early days of the current business world. Through the main character, Benny White, we learn how a business was conducted and how management evolved over decades with the introduction of business theories, including project management.

In order to be successful, companies need to listen and respond to customers' needs and expectations. This helps companies to find out what customers really want from them and what they really think of their services. It also helps them to keep existing customers and attract new ones.There are five main ways of getting feedback from customers. You can simply observe your customers' behavior, hold a focus group, or conduct a survey. You can also use your salespeople and customer service teams to glean feedback from customers. The Web, e-mail, and social networking allow you to gather feedback from customers in any location. Each provide their own types of data, and companies should choose which ones suit them best.There are four main steps involved in exploring customer needs. First you need to gather information about the customers' current situation. You then try to discover their desired situation. You also need to investigate any past experiences they may have had with products similar to yours and finally you carry out a gap analysis.Companies need to manage customer expectations in order to try and provide the final outcome they expect. Customers expect a collaborative relationship, choice, and good value. They also expect prompt response and dispute resolution, a feeling of importance, transparency, two-way communication, and relevant marketing campaigns.CRM systems help you to efficiently manage your customers' expectations. There are different strategies for this that ensure that the needs of your customers are met quickly and completely. CRM also helps you to provide effective, efficient processes and put your customer at the center of the organization. Finally CRM provides end-to-end connectivity that links the organization with its internal and external customers and its suppliers.Every organization that wants to move to being more customer focused should have a strategy in place. This customer-focused strategy is built around three key decisions.The appropriate scale and scope of your strategy is the first crucial decision. This refers to the elements that need to be involved in your organization's customer focus solution.Next, you must decide the level of integration between these elements. Finally, you need to make the decision whether to create a low, moderate, or high level of customer focus.When designing your strategy, taken into account the relevant operational strategies for becoming more customer focused that already exist, including Six Sigma and customer relationship management (CRM).

Thinkers50 Top 10 Best New Management Books for 2022 A distinguished Harvard Business School professor offers a compelling reassessment and defense of purpose as a management ethos, documenting the vast performance gains and social benefits that become possible when firms manage to get purpose right. Few business topics have aroused more skepticism in recent years than the notion of corporate purpose, and for good reason. Too many companies deploy purpose, or a reason for being, as a promotional vehicle to make themselves feel virtuous and to look good to the outside world. Some have only foggy ideas about what purpose is and conflate it with strategy and other concepts like “mission,” “vision,” and “values.” Even well-intentioned leaders don’t understand purpose’s full potential and engage half-heartedly and superficially with it. Outsiders spot this and become cynical about companies and the broader capitalist endeavor. Having conducted extensive field research, Ranjay Gulati reveals the fatal mistakes leaders unwittingly make when attempting to implement a reason for being. Moreover, he shows how companies can embed purpose much more deeply than they currently do, delivering impressive performance benefits that reward customers, suppliers, employees, shareholders, and communities alike. To get purpose right, leaders must fundamentally change not only how they execute it but also how they conceive of and relate to it. They must practice what Gulati calls deep purpose, furthering each organization’s reason for being more intensely, thoughtfully, and comprehensively than ever before. In this authoritative, accessible, and inspiring guide, Gulati takes readers inside some of the world’s most purposeful companies to understand the secrets to their successes. He explores how leaders can pursue purpose more deeply by navigating the inevitable tradeoffs more deliberately and effectively to balance between short- and long-term value; building purpose more systematically into every key organizational function to mobilize stakeholders and enhance performance; updating organizations to foster more autonomy and collaboration, which in turn allow individual employees to work more purposefully; using powerful storytelling to communicate a reason for being, arousing emotions and building a community of inspired and committed stakeholders; and building cultures that don’t merely support purpose, but also allow employees to link the corporate purpose to their own personal reasons for being. As Gulati argues, a deeper engagement with purpose holds the key not merely to the well-being of individual companies but also to humanity’s future. With capitalism under siege and relatively low levels of trust in business, purpose can serve as a radically new operating system for the enterprise, enhancing performance while also delivering meaningful benefits to society. It’s the kind of inspired thinking that businesses—and the rest of us—urgently need.

If you’re striving to make products and services that your customers will love, then you’ll need a customer-driven organization. As companies transform their businesses to meet the demands of the digital age, they find themselves grappling with uniquely human challenges. Organizational knowledge becomes siloed, employees move to safeguard their expertise, and customer data creates polarization and infighting between teams. All of these challenges widen the distance between the people who make your products and the customers who use them. To meet today’s challenges, companies need to do more than build processes for customer-driven products. They need to create a customer-driven culture. With the help of his friend and mentor Monty Hammontree, Travis Lowdermilk takes readers through the cultural transformation of the Developer Division at Microsoft. This book shows readers how to "hack" their culture and reduce the distance between them and their customers’ needs. It’s a uniquely personal story that’s told amidst a cultural revolution at one of the largest software companies in the world. This story acts as your guide. You’ll learn how to: Establish a Common Language: Help employees change their thinking and actions Build Bridges, Not Walls: Treat product building as a team sport Encourage Learning Versus Knowing: Help your team understand their customers Build Leaders That Build Your Culture: Showcase star employees to inspire others Meet Teams Where They Are: Make it easy for teams to to adopt vital behavior changes Make Data Relatable: Move beyond numbers and focus on empathizing with customers

Not all customers are created equal. Despite what the tired old adage says, the customer is not always right. Not all customers deserve your best efforts: in the world of customer centricity, there are good customers...and then there is pretty much everybody else. Upending some of our most fundamental beliefs, renowned behavioral data expert Peter Fader, Co-Director of The Wharton Customer Analytics Initiative, helps businesses radically rethink how they relate to customers. He provides insights to help you revamp your performance metrics, product development, customer relationship management and organization in order to make sure you focus directly on the needs of your most valuable customers and increase profits for the long term.