Shaping a customer-first culture

According to a survey by "CEConlines" magazine, "building a corporate culture" tops the list of issues that Chinese managers are most concerned about, alongside "satisfying customers".

Combining these two points, we can see the direction of the efforts of most outstanding companies in the world - building a customer-centric corporate culture.

Why do these companies attach so much importance to corporate culture? Because they know that, while corporate culture used to be just an icing on the cake, it is now a critical element of business success. A survey by InMomentum found that companies with a clear corporate culture grow ten times faster than those with an unclear corporate culture. These so-called "high culture" companies had an average net sales growth rate of 141 percent, compared with 9 percent for those with "low culture."

Businesses with strong corporate cultures have a proven approach to building strong relationships with their customers. Adobe Systems Inc. is a typical example. The company's president and CEO, John Warnock, surfs the Internet every day to visit customer chat rooms and then to Adobe's creative and product development center. The employees of the company will publish their ideas and suggestions for research and development products here.

InMomentum CEO and President Lynne Waldera said in an interview with eWEEK magazine: "He directly integrates customer input and feedback with the company's product development process." Directly driven by a "communicative culture" that has ensured the success of the computer software maker, sales have grown by 25 percent in the last year alone.

How to build a customer-first corporate culture? More importantly, how to transform the original culture of the enterprise into serving customers as the highest purpose? The following excellent experiences can help companies do just that.

If customers are dissatisfied,
Change the corporate culture

For example, Acxiom's leaders realized that the company's corporate culture was no longer suitable for the requirements of the 21st century, so they acted decisively and actively cultivated New corporate culture.

Only a fundamental change in the corporate culture can ensure the growth of the company. Acxiom is a new force in the data mining industry. Its business is to collect phone numbers, addresses and demographic data for client companies, analyze the data, and enable customers to tap potential new customers while serving existing customers. If Acxiom wants to stay ahead of tough competition, it must react quickly to seize business opportunities as they arise. More importantly, enterprises must also be flexible and good at meeting the special needs of different customers.

However, if a company must have the CEO personally involved in making all decisions, it is difficult to be flexible enough to meet the needs of all customers. This is the case with Acxiom.

The decision-making process is long and tedious, so everyone's participation is low. Customer satisfaction, cooperation satisfaction and process efficiency are also greatly affected. The company's chief executive, Charles Morgan, told his executives that unless the business found a new way of operating, it would never grow fully.

As a result, a decentralised, pragmatic corporate culture has replaced the previous tier-by-tier imperative tradition, where managers in each department have the power to make flexible decisions directly on customer requirements.

A spokesman for Acxiom said: "We have overhauled our corporate structure, creating a flat and team-based structure." The old job titles have been completely abolished and replaced by a set of criteria based on experience level employee grading system.

A manager said: "In the past, the employee with the highest position in the department had the final say. Now everyone who faces customers has the right to make decisions." The company also encourages employees to self-manage and choose the best Managers have also learned to focus only on the department's work goals and results, rather than the process.

Replacing "Following Culture" with "Pioneer Culture"

What is the difference between the two corporate cultures? The so-called follow-up culture focuses on competitors. Conversely, the avant-garde culture is not swayed by the actions of its opponents, but strives to find its own path. A pioneering corporate culture is often more likely to be customer-centric, primarily because it places more emphasis on innovating products and services based on customer requirements rather than competing head-on for customers with competitors.

For example, Amazon.com (amazon.com) is known for its pioneering corporate culture. This retail site doesn't focus on competing with its rivals. CEO Jeff Bezos believes that the pioneer culture is more about the customer. The key to building that culture, he says, is finding the right people and knowing which people aren't right for the business. Those who want a stable work environment will not enjoy working in this corporate culture. Bezos said it's not uncommon for such people to leave Amazon.

Instill the concept of
"customer for life" in your employees

How long will you be able to interact with others in your lifetime? You and your employees should ask yourself this question every time you face a client.

Carl Sewell, author of "Customers for Life," said: "No one wants to deal with short-term customers, but they want to work together forever."

Yes Reinforcing this concept requires training employees not to view the customer as a one-time purchase, but as a lifetime customer. Calculate the amount of transactions a lifetime customer brings you, and remember that he can also spend money on your competitors.

Also, you need to know: You must know which customers are your lifelong customers and treat them accordingly. While treating all customers with kindness, they must also be treated with the utmost care. They should always enjoy prompt and flawless priority service.

Becoming a creative company

Volkswagen President Bernd Pischetsrieder is a big fan of "cigar evenings". At such gatherings, he would sit around with managers, sipping cigars and chatting about new ideas. Obviously, such gatherings help connect feelings, but the key is the strategic significance of the event. Volkswagen knows it can't compete with auto giants like Toyota, Ford or General Motors on the basis of economy and efficiency alone. It must rely on original ideas to produce first-class products.

The foundation of the "popular corporate culture" in Briard's mind is customer-centric creativity. The biggest obstacle to building this corporate culture is market research. Market research is now widely believed to help companies get closer to customers, but Volkswagen's president is skeptical.

In an interview with Car magazine last August, he said: "The most difficult thing in our industry is the marketing department. The heads of these departments know the past and There is no way to know the tastes of customers in the next five years. You can't learn about people's likes through customer surveys, only what they don't like. What they don't like now, probably won't like in the future. But their likes are in Constantly changing. If you ask customers what their tastes will be in the next five or ten years, they are never going to get it right. But if our engineers have a precise grasp of what is and isn't going to happen in the future, and customers tell us what they are If there are dissatisfactions with existing products, we may combine this information to innovate."

Now, take a moment to think: In your corporate culture, do you use customer surveys to understand their preferences? If pure customer research doesn't work, would you choose to build a corporate culture that transcends tradition and encourages innovation?

Build an Overseas Marketing Culture

If your company is an international business, it is imperative that you hire people in countries around the world to be responsible for local marketing. But we must not just stop at this step, but create a culture to help employees adapt to the international business environment.

At one point, Mattel, a toy maker, experienced a financial deterioration. In order to reverse the situation, the company's CEO Robert Eckert suspended some investment projects and increased investment in corporate culture and personnel training.

Mattel has partnered with the Thunderbird Institute of International Management to develop a leadership training program. These programs focus on developing a variety of day-to-day management skills to help companies build a more strategic, performance-based corporate culture, thereby delivering more innovative products to customers.

According to Workforce magazine, Mattel's global leadership program has improved the knowledge and skills of managers in all countries, and said Grace MacArthur, vice president of leadership development and program design advocate, that "now" Global management has become inextricably linked to corporate strategy and goals. This relationship, in turn, has led to innovative products, reduced costs, and increased employee satisfaction." Now, she says, employees are freed from their The situation of being in battle has formed a sense of belonging to Mattel.

Another successful example of a global operating corporate culture featured in People magazine is Novo Nordisk, a Danish company specializing in medical products for diabetes. Creating an excellent corporate culture is only one of the five "personnel strategies" of the company. The other four are customer relations, talent training, equal opportunities, and absorbing and retaining outstanding talents.

Novo Nordisk has developed guidelines for "people strategy" for each branch company, covering five areas. This standard sets out a specific annual mission plan for each aspect. For example, the company stipulates that a certain percentage of corporate professionals must meet with people with diabetes to discuss their condition and treatment. It is this provision that forms the cornerstone of an enterprise's customer relationship strategy. Lars Rebien Soerensen, CEO of Novo Nordisk, said: "Our challenge is to build a global perspective while adhering to our values and culture."

Choosing people who fit into the culture

A mistake many companies make One is to place the responsibility for changing the corporate culture entirely on human resources. The change of corporate culture is not only a human resources issue, but also the responsibility of corporate leadership. The successful transformation of corporate culture is difficult to achieve unless the executives of the company personally act.

However, if you want to build a customer-first corporate culture, the human resources department has a pivotal role—selecting people who fit the corporate culture.

Rosen-bluth International is one of the most successful travel agencies in the world. Enterprises have long adhered to a series of important values: First, customer service is the decisive factor for the survival and long-term development of enterprises. Second, the quality of customer service depends primarily on how personnel are hired and trained.

In this regard, Rosenberg is by no means alone. In today's enterprises, the human resources department is also paying more and more attention to improving customer satisfaction. They provide various support to employees through various human resource activities such as hiring, training, mentoring and evaluation, helping employees establish and develop long-term and stable relationships with customers.

Sears Roebuck, which owns a chain of 800 stores, provides concrete proof of this point through an analytical study. According to Sears' analysis, if a company's employees' work attitude improves by 5%, customer satisfaction with the company will increase by 1.3%, and the company's profits will increase by 0.5%.

However, to achieve these results, hiring the right people is the first step. What kind of personnel can adapt to this "customer-friendly" corporate culture? Management writer Ron Zemke suggests some basic traits: optimism, flexibility, empathy, and the ability to face tension or criticism. These qualities are difficult to acquire through training, so companies must carefully select people who have these qualities in their own right when hiring.

So, what character traits are not suitable for a customer-first corporate culture? Howard Schultz, the founder of Starbucks, has a clear answer: Be wary of people from a rigid, bureaucratic business. When you hire people, you're not just hiring people for their skills. You're also hiring the corporate culture they bring from the companies they've worked for in the past. In "55 Business Leaders and Success," Schultz says, "I wouldn't turn down someone just because he's from a conservative, rigid corporation, but I would be more careful and would It is more prudent to extrapolate whether this person can escape the influence of the past corporate culture."

Reform company systems and processes

No one has been more successful in promoting a "customer first" corporate culture than Louis Gerstner's IBM's reformation. In a sense, the company's previous culture was "stifling," even "negative." IBM has gradually become a "form over content" and "conservation of old traditions at all costs" business.

Gerstner strongly advocates focus on customers and the market, humbly learning from competitors' strengths, and the importance of meeting important customers.

He summed up his experience like this: "The company's original culture is against change and does not meet the requirements of corporate strategy. In this case, what you need to do is to integrate the corporate work procedures and corporate culture on which the corporate culture depends. A complete change in thinking." (See the article "Why Elephants Can Dance" (P30) for IBM's specific practices in China.)

If you are planning to change or improve the operating procedures of your company, "Customer-First" The advice of Richard C. Whiteley, author of The Customer-Driven Company, is helpful. He believes that the reform should start from the following aspects, especially those closely related to those customers:

● Strengthen the consistency and coherence of the work. If you plan to overhaul the way you order, how do you make the new way to ensure consistency across all orders? Can the original three or four suppliers be replaced by a unified supplier?

●Reduce intermediate links. Carefully examine the company's workflow and count the number of times a job has changed hands. Every handover has the potential to cause misunderstandings, delays and omissions. Can you design a workflow with fewer intermediate links?

● Integration steps. Whenever possible, combine two or more work steps into one.

●Replace the tandem work method with the parallel work method. Instead of completing a task step by step in sequence, it can save a lot of time by doing it in a multi-pronged manner, with different people working on different tasks at the same time.

●Increase production value as much as possible and eliminate all waste. For example, shortening the geographic distance between two processes to reduce transportation costs. Or improve the profitability of the workflow itself.

Whiteley also added that after the improvement of the working procedures is completed, the new procedures should be strictly tested and analyzed. Ask yourself, "How does this new process bring greater value to customers?"

Change the way decisions are made

According to leadership expert John P. Kotter, The most effective way to change corporate culture is to change the decision-making environment. ConAgra, under the leadership of CEO Mike Harper, is a testament to that.

Harper believes that creating a good business environment is the most important task for management. The environmental conditions necessary to establish an excellent corporate culture include: acting autonomously, only responsible for the final result, freedom of dissent and questioning, personnel training, ability training, and respect for individuality.

Helmut Panke, managing director of BMW AG, would certainly agree with the statement that "changing corporate culture is about changing the way decisions are made." In a recent interview, he repeatedly reiterated that BMW's corporate culture is a key factor in its success. When he was a consultant at McKinsey, he noticed that BMW employees were free to work as they wanted without being constrained by bureaucracy. "They can move forward without repression, and that's where a business has a competitive advantage."

Reforming the pay system

If you want your employees to value something, the best way to do it is to tie it to pay. This method has been tried and tested in many management activities, and it is also effective in changing corporate culture. A few years ago, the National Industry and Mapping Agency in the United States won the "Management Change Award" for this approach.

Their successful experience can be used for most companies to learn from: they broke the traditional "senior salary system" (that is, the salary level is assessed according to the number of years of service), adopted the "performance salary" system, and introduced a new evaluation The system turns the analysis of the past employee's work performance into the evaluation of employees' contribution to the corporate strategy. They also invented a new post analysis and grading system, which enables enterprises to concentrate technical strength on important tasks and outsource secondary functions, thereby achieving savings in human and material resources.

Gerstner was also the first to take action on the company's compensation system. "We have changed the company's performance standard system. We announced that the treatment of employees is no longer based on the performance of the department, but must be based on the overall performance of the company."

Establish quantitative progress indicators

To change the corporate culture, it is best to let employees fully understand the specific progress of corporate culture construction. "Dashboard" system---quantitative display of important indicators, so that every employee can see at a glance, its function and form are very similar to the dashboard on a car---it is very helpful.

When Richard H. Brown took over the helm of Electronic Data Systems (EDS), he found that the company had some serious problems. Among them are two closely related problems: the corporate culture is isolated and closed, and customer satisfaction is low.

In order to change the introverted corporate culture, EDS takes the initiative to cooperate with computer hardware and software sellers in order to make the company's sales services more convenient and perfect. To ensure that the expansion of the sales area led to higher sales, Brown created a computerized "service quality dashboard" that displayed precisely how customers and business managers responded to the company's performance.

Satisfied customers noticed a change in the company's corporate culture. For the first time, some customers had the opportunity to interview senior EDS executives, a sign that the company's previous lack of focus on customers has improved. The most common evaluation of the company by EDS clients is: "They're listening to us now."

Vanguard is also a successful Dashboard company, and the Six Sigma system implemented within the company has made the corporate culture more relevant. Discipline.

The group grew rapidly a few years ago, resulting in a relative lag and inefficiency of the management team. To this end, the group decided to introduce the Six Sigma system and create a regular management system named "Vanguard Unrivaled Performance" (VUE). At the heart of the VUE system is the "dashboard", a computer used to collect and process data on customer needs and business performance. All managers target the data on the "dashboard" and communicate to all employees who have an impact on the data. The data on the "dashboard" is constantly updated to reflect the performance results of each work team at any time. For example, people who receive customer calls can understand the impact of their interactions with customers on business operations by observing data changes in the "dashboard".

Inspiring employees

BMW has developed a lengthy "Code of Conduct for Corporate Employees". In order to avoid creating a serious and stereotyped corporate culture, the "Guidelines" added the famous seventh rule: managers have the responsibility to create a "interesting" working atmosphere in the enterprise.

In general, the relationship between work interest and business performance has previously been undervalued. BMW is the first to suggest that employee interest in work is an important factor in product production. Their thinking is that if employees are interested in their work, customers will also find joy and interest in the products they make. General Manager Punk assures: "We will never produce boring cars."

Punk sums up all managers who share the same opinion: "If employees can work in a happy atmosphere, they will Driven."

Act early, but persevere

If you're going to change the culture of your business, how quickly do you plan to see results? If you limit the time to one year, I am afraid you will have to readjust your expectations. Even for a small or medium-sized company, a change in corporate culture takes at least two years. According to the estimation of human resources experts, it will take at least 5 years or more time to truly realize the change of corporate culture.

Four years after receiving the Optimas Award for Outstanding Management Reform, Philadelphia Electric Co. is still working on a fundamental change in its corporate culture.

It takes about 6 years to realize the change of the core culture of the company. When the Shangri-La hotel decided to change its corporate culture, it set a time frame of at least five years.

Gerstner considers the arduous task of changing IBM's corporate culture one of the biggest he's ever faced. Jeffrey A. Krames, author of "What the Best CEOs Know," said that when he asked Gerstner what he thought of other managers looking to change corporate culture When advising Ho, the former IBM CEO and president said, "Be patient. Patience doesn't mean resting on your laurels...it's taking your time. In my experience, progress in changing a company's culture is always faster than Your expectations are slow. Speaking of which, you always feel like you have a clear purpose when you start a change. But I want to emphasize that one of the reasons why attempts to achieve a fundamental change in corporate culture are rarely successful is that managers don't The criteria for success often lack a clear understanding."

Author Jet Magsaysay is a consultant for the magazine, translated by Zhu Xiaofan.