The Two Overlooked Traps When Building a Customer-Centric Culture

I am a big fan of the customer-centric organization vision. It is an old and simple idea, yet a very difficult one to implement. It states that we should bring a customer focus to each department of the organization.

In the last couple of years, I had the privilege to manage a team of talented CSMs in the US and internationally, at Singular. For full transparency, I am not at Singular anymore and the opinions I share here are solely mine and do not engage my former employer in any way. At the time I joined them, Singular was an early pioneer on the customer-centric journey:

1. It invested in an intelligent and evolving implementation of Gainsight, the strongly emerging SaaS platform for Customer Success (CS)

2. It created a CS organization tasked with increasing customer satisfaction and customer’s product usage while leaving renewals and up-sells in the hands of an Account Management team.

3. And it hired key CS talent, including Ben Timmons, one of the best CS leader and innovative power user of Gainsight I worked with.

This post is not about all the best practices that you should use to build a first-grade CS organization. There are a good number of experience-driven blogs that address the topic. I personally like Nick Mehta’s MehtaPhysical blog and would recommend you to read it regularly (Nick is CEO at Gainsight).

Rather, this post is about the two biggest traps I see when attempting to implement a customer-centric vision.

First Trap- Making CS Just Another Siloed Functional Unit

The whole idea behind that vision is to bridge all the functional units of an organization with a customer lens. Of course, that involves creating a CS team and thus a new department. Good CS solutions, like Gainsight, do a good job connecting the different functional unit by offering native integrations to access customer information from other functional units, hence giving you a fuller view of your customer inside CS. For instance accessing Zendesk (Support), Jira (Product), Salesforce (Sales), Marketo (Marketing), and NetSuite (Finance) directly from your CS solution. However, other departments do not see their company’s CS solution as an “always on” source of customer information. This perpetuates the silo mentality. Let me give you a simple example. Finance automatically sends a tough letter to all customers who are 2 months late on their payables but doesn’t take into account that a large customer has averaged a very low NPS score in the last 6 months.

The way to address this is twofold and in both cases, workflow-related:

1. 1. Make your CS system more authoritative by creating and owning customer objective workflows directly from it. Make sure that these workflows span to other relevant functional units. For instance, establish and manage Customer OKRs directly in your CS solution and create key results (KRs) supporting that objective in other functional units solutions. For example, the objective could be to increase net retention by 20% this quarter. Your CS solution automatically sends the 20% net retention increase objective to Zendesk, along with a report of all renewals coming up this quarter. The workflow then requests a quantified series of key results from Support to support the 20% objective.
2. 2. All your other functional units systems should “ping” your CS system whenever they activate a typical workflow. For instance, Product should be able to access, from Jira, an up to date and ranked customer requests list that resides in your CS tool when building its roadmap.

Second Trap- Not Rethinking Organizational Mapping Around the Customer

Software alone will not cut it. Since you are trying to bring a customer focus within all functional units, things need to change at the people level. You need to implement a customer culture, which is probably the hardest step in your customer-centricity journey. You need to augment your organization. And by that, I do not mean just creating a CS department and hiring a CCO, it has to be more transformative. My suggested solution here is to create a matrix organization with dual reporting, what Andy Grove called a “two-plane organization” in his famous book High Output Management. The details, in this case, would be as follow:

1. 1. Create a Customer Council, comprised of the heads from each functional unit
2. 2. Have the CCO lead the Customer Council and meet on a monthly basis to discuss customer alignment issues and solutions. Issues to discuss are: how to align all teams’ objectives to support the overarching customer objectives of the quarter? What customer data needs to be shared, by which functional units, and when? Is next quarter product roadmap aligned with customers’ priorities? What are the recruiting needs to support the next 6 and 12 months objectives? Etc.
3. 3. Put a Customer Voice Rep in each functional unit (no need to create a new position, an existing member of that team can wear that hat)
4. 4. Have each Customer Voice Rep attend the Customer Council meetings
5. 5. Have each Customer Voice Rep dual-reports to their usual boss in the functional unit and to the Customer Council.

While this solution creates a little complexity, the cost of complexity is largely outweighed by the benefits of operating in both functional and customer-oriented teams, i.e. improved product innovation, increased transparency, aligned teams, and reduced customer churn. That’s in my view how you start creating a customer culture in your company.