Interested in a Free Book for your Late Summer Holistays?
Of course you are! Everybody likes a freebie. A free draw.
Sitting on the beach; chilling out; reading a book. But which one? Or which beach? Given all that’s happening in the world at the moment, few of us are traveling long distances to get away this year. Holistays and staycations are big in 2020.
We can’t solve the issue of having to stay at home but we can provide you with a little light reading material for the back garden, couch or bathtub – you choose.
How to Enter Our Summer Giveaway
From Jun to October, we’re giving away a free Kindle edition of Customer At The Heart to a few lucky winners each week.
OK, it’s not quite Sally Rooney’s Normal People or even Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s Love in the Time of Cholera but it should be of interest to any CEO, Sales Director or Chief Customer Officer in a B2B company who is interested in increasing revenues and reducing customer churn.
If you’re interested if throwing your name in the hat for a free electronic copy, all you need to go to our Contact Us page and tell us that you’d like to enter. Easier still, just send us an email with the phrase Customer At The Heart in the subject of your message.
It’s as simple as that. Enter every week if you like! We’ll announce the winner every weekend and send out a Kindle voucher to the lucky winner.
By the way, we take data privacy seriously – we’ll only use email addresses to send a copy of the book to the winner each week and we’ll delete all email addresses at the end of each weekly draw.
Stay safe.
John O’Connor
CEO, Deep-Insight
Footnote
Have you ever wondered when the words ‘staycation’ and ‘holistays’ came into common usage?
staycationnoun
/ˌsteɪˈkeɪʃn/
a holiday that you spend at or near your home
“Turn off your phone and computer—you’re on staycation, remember?”
“UK holidaymakers opt for a staycation in Britain.”
I used to think they were both very recent inventions. I certainly never heard of the terms before the last global recession a decade ago. Well, it turns out that both words were in fairly common usage from 2003. There’s even some research from Merriam-Webster that suggests the word ‘staycation’ originated as far back as 1944.
The other thing I didn’t realise is that the words have slightly different meanings in Europe and the USA. Americans tend to use the term for activities that can be carried out within driving distance of their home where overnight accommodation is not required. Europeans – or British people at least – use the phrase to describe a holiday that is spent in one’s home country rather than abroad.
GUEST BLOG FROM PETER WHITELAW, AUSTRALIAN BUSINESS CONSULTANT AND CO-AUTHOR OF CUSTOMER AT THE HEART
Wash. Rinse. Repeat.
If you conduct a customer survey only once, you capture a single ‘snapshot’ in time. That snapshot will usually give you valuable information including customer concerns that deserve remedial actions.
BUT you:
1. Will never know if those remedial actions actually resolved the customer’s concerns 2. Won’t know what’s trending. Are customers more loyal or less loyal? Are more of them actively considering defecting to your competitors? 3. Might never improve your customer relationships
Customer centricity requires continual contact with the customer. Hence the importance of iteration.
Wash. Rinse. Repeat.
Customer Centricity and Agile
There are many similarities between an iterative approach in customer centricity surveys and the Agile project management methodology.
“Agile is an iterative approach to project management and software development that helps teams deliver value to their customers faster and with fewer headaches. Instead of betting everything on a ‘big bang’ launch, an agile team delivers work in small, but consumable, increments.” (Atlassian 2020)
The Agile Manifesto, developed in 2001, includes these key principles:
• Focus on people over process
• Embed customers and their feedback in order to continuously improve
• Deconstruct work into small segments and organize effort into short chunks (typically called sprints) in order to get quick feedback and make nimble (agile!) course corrections
• Dedicate people to teams and focus on one project at a time
• Experiment and learn continuously
• Ensure transparency of the work and continuity of the team
The Importance of Iteration in Customer Centricity
Iteration means adopting a cyclical approach to seeking customer feedback. You need to repeat regularly. At least once every year. And remember that first principle I mentioned. Focus on people over process. Get buy-in from the account teams as they have to own the customer programme. If they don’t, it will be seen as ‘just another Head Office initiative’ and will fail.
Benefits of Iteration in Customer Centricity
• Identifies trends and locates intransigent problems (that the customer perceives)
• Enables account managers to interact with customers in a non-selling mode, building trust
• Is seen to be consistently seeking customer feedback with the objective of continuous improvement
Consequences of Not Iterating in Customer Centricity
• Customers perceive that you no longer care about their opinions and that their past participation was a waste of time
• Your organisation drifts away from its strategy of achieving customer centricity
• Staff may feel they are no longer accountable for the quality of customer relationships
Peter Whitelaw is an Australian consultant providing customer relationship assessments, customer centricity guidance and change management services. He has a background in engineering, sales and general management with Hewlett Packard, Tektronix and Optus Communications. For 11 years he was CEO of project and change management training and consulting company Rational Management, training thousands of managers across the world. In recent years he has been lead consultant on several change management and customer centricity projects for both commercial and government organisations.
Interested in a Free Book for your Summer Holistays?
Of course you are!
For those of us in the northern hemisphere, the days are getting longer and temperatures are becoming respectable again. Conversations are drifting towards the topic of summer holidays. Sitting on the beach; chilling out; reading a book. But which one? Or which beach? Given all that’s happening in the world at the moment, very few of us will be traveling long distances to get away this year. Holistays and staycations are going to be big in 2020.
Unfortunately, we can’t solve the issue of having to stay at home this summer. However we can provide you with a little light reading material for the back garden, couch or bathtub – you choose.
How to Enter Our Summer Giveaway
For the next 13 weeks we’re going to give away a few free Kindle editions of Customer At The Heart to one lucky winner each week.
OK, it’s not quite Sally Rooney’s Normal People or even Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s Love in the Time of Cholera but it should be of interest to any CEO, Sales Director or Chief Customer Officer in a B2B company who is interested in increasing revenues and reducing customer churn.
If you’re interested if throwing your name in the hat for a free electronic copy, all you need to go to our Contact Us page and tell us that you’d like to enter. Easier still, just send us an email with the phrase Customer At The Heart in the subject of your message.
It’s as simple as that. Enter every week if you like! We’ll announce the winner every Friday and send out a Kindle voucher to the lucky winner the same day.
By the way, we take data privacy seriously – we’ll only use email addresses to send a copy of the book to the winner each week and we’ll delete all email addresses at the end of each weekly draw.
Stay safe over the summer months. John O’Connor
CEO, Deep-Insight
Footnote
Have you ever wondered when the words ‘staycation’ and ‘holistays’ came into common usage?
staycationnoun
/ˌsteɪˈkeɪʃn/
a holiday that you spend at or near your home
“Turn off your phone and computer—you’re on staycation, remember?”
“UK holidaymakers opt for a staycation in Britain.”
I used to think they were both very recent inventions. I certainly never heard of the terms before the last global recession a decade ago. Well, it turns out that both words were in fairly common usage from 2003. There’s even some research from Merriam-Webster that suggests the word ‘staycation’ originated as far back as 1944.
The other thing I didn’t realise is that the words have slightly different meanings in Europe and the USA. Americans tend to use the term for activities that can be carried out within driving distance of their home where overnight accommodation is not required. Europeans – or British people at least – use the phrase to describe a holiday that is spent in one’s home country rather than abroad.
It’s a story about Leadership, first and foremost. But it’s also a story about Strategy, Execution and Culture – the key themes in a new book about how B2B leaders build customer-centric organisations.
Shay Walsh is the Managing Director of BT Ireland and was our guest speaker at a recent breakfast seminar at the Irish Management Institute. His topic was ‘Customer at the Heart’ and Shay told the story of how BT transformed itself into one of Ireland’s leading customer-centric companies. It wasn’t an overnight transformation but BT was lucky enough to have a series of MDs, all of whom shared the passion for putting the customer at the heart.
LEADERSHIP
BT’s Irish operations are purely business-to-business (B2B) unlike its British Telecom parent which sells to both consumers and businesses.
Back in 2008, BT Ireland knew that it had poor or deteriorating relationships with some corporate and government customers but didn’t have an accurate assessment of the quality of these relationships. Chris Clark is the first leader in Shay’s story. He was the MD who first engaged Deep-Insight to find out.
The initial customer feedback was poor. Very poor. BT was in the ‘Danger Zone’ but Chris Clark now had a baseline from which to start rebuilding the business.
Shay Walsh was part of Chris’ leadership team and ran the Irish wholesale business. Chris and Shay had no easy fixes – there was no silver bullet. Just a lot of poor processes, unhappy customers and a leadership team determined to get to the bottom of the issues and do the right thing for their customers.
FROM BAD TO GOOD
Chris, Shay and the rest of the BT leadership team all believed passionately that the journey to financial success had to be built around a clear focus on the customer. They set about fixing what was broken and repairing the damaged client relationships. When Chris got promoted within BT, Graham Sutherland took over as MD. Progress was slow at first but Shay and other members of Graham’s leadership team finally got to grips with the underlying problems. One by one, they fixed them. They called the overall transformation programme ‘Customer First’. By 2011, BT had not only exited the ‘Danger Zone’ but had managed to get into the ‘Performing Zone’.
BUILDING AN EXECUTION CAPABILITY
Colm O’Neill accelerated BT’s ‘Customer First’ programme when he became MD of BT Ireland in 2011. He appointed a Customer Experience director called Mairead McSweeney who drove the programme with ruthless precision. Mairead initially assessed how customers felt about BT every six months before moving to an annual cycle. She put governance rules in place to ensure that the right individuals in the right clients were contacted. She made sure that the ‘Customer First’ programme could not be ‘gamed’.
Shay Walsh was now MD of Business Sales and he and the entire organisation (not just the sales team) were incentivised on the quality of the relationships they had with BT Ireland. Sales teams had targets set either at an individual level or at a team level. The senior leadership team had an overall BT Ireland target to hit for Customer Relationship Quality (CRQ) before incentives were paid out.
FROM GOOD TO GREAT
Shay, Colm and Mairead now embarked on the second half of the BT customer journey – going from Good to Great. A different set of skills and capabilities was required because you can’t fix your way to greatness. Now it was down to the sales and service teams, working together, to identify where they could bring added value to clients. Then they made sure that the BT organisation could deliver on those promised value-adding improvements. In 2014, BT reached the ‘Unique Zone” – essentially the top 10% of Deep-Insight’s database.
THE ENEMY: COMPLACENCY
When you’re on top, the only way is down. The enemy is complacency. What was refreshing about Shay’s talk was his honesty about the fact that not everything is perfect in BT. They still get things wrong some of the time. The majority of customers may be extremely happy but Shay and his team are not resting on their laurels.
Shay Walsh became MD of BT Ireland in 2015. Since then, he has been pushing an agenda of continuous improvement in the company. There is no room for complacency in Shay’s organisation as the pressure in the telecommunications industry for better, cheaper services is relentless.
WAS IT WORTH IT?
Absolutely, says Shay Walsh. BT Ireland is still in the ‘Unique Zone’ but more importantly, the company is in a profitable and extremely stable position. Shay’s final slide sums up the BT Ireland story and the benefits of putting the customer at the heart:
Long-lasting relationships with clients
Increasing revenues from those relationships
80% of next year’s target revenues already contracted
Extremely happy customers – 57% are Ambassador clients for Shay and his team
PODCAST
This is a summary of the BT Ireland story. To hear Shay Walsh tell the story in full, listen to the full podcast on the Irish Management Institute website.
If you want to find out more about the BT Ireland story or how to put the customer at the heart of your company, contact us today or click on the link below to read about how business leaders in BT and several other organisations have transformed their companies to become truly customer-centric:
Last Saturday, our CEO John O’Connor was interviewed on Newstalk’s Down To Business weekend radio programme about his new book Customer At The Heart. If you missed the show, here’s that conversation between Bobby and John again.
Quite a few topics were covered in the short interview with Bobby Kerr. The one that I enjoyed most was the concept of “sacking the customer” – being honest about when you can’t service particular clients and choosing instead to concentrate on customers where you know you can excel.
Feel free to get in touch with us if you want to hear more about Deep-Insight’s work in helping CEOs create customer-centric organisations. And if you want to find out more about dealing with clients that are Opponents and Stalkers, just click here for another blog on the topic.
Craig Johnson
Customer Relationship Advisor, Deep-Insight
Customer At The Heart
Bobby Kerr: A lot of words have been said and written about putting the customer first but many businesses and business leaders struggle to move away from product and technology-based models to ones that are truly customer-centric. So how hard can it actually be? John O’Connor is the CEO of Cork-based company Deep-Insight and he is the co-author of Customer At The Heart: how B2B leaders build successful customer-centric organisations. John, you’re very welcome to the programme. Tell me a little about your background and what inspired you to write this customer-centric book.
John O’Connor: First of all, you need to be a big mad to write a business book. I was saying earlier that we’re not going to knock Margaret Atwood off the top of the Amazon charts even though the book is available on Amazon. So why did we write the book? One question has been rattling around in my mind for the last 15 years that I’ve been running Deep-Insight. At Deep-Insight, we gather feedback for Business-to-Business (B2B) customers with the objective of getting our clients to use that feedback to build deeper client relationships. Sometimes we tell our clients “You’ve got a fantastic set of customers who love you to death.” Other times it’s a case of: “They hate your service and want to move away from you”. In that second case, it seems phenomenally difficult for our clients to move the dial and really improve their customer scores. Or if they can improve, it takes them a long, long time. So the question we had in our minds was: “Why does it take so long, and what is it that you have to do to transform an organisation to be truly customer-centric?”
Bobby: I once worked with a guy who used to tell me that a customer was somebody that allows you to make a profit. That was his definition of a customer. If you have a customer that doesn’t allow you to make a profit – because they are high-maintenance, they take up time, you have to manage them and you find that you can’t make a profit – how do you deal with that situation?
How to ‘Sack A Customer’
John: So here’s a little trick. You’ll find that in any portfolio of customers, probably a third are ‘Ambassadors’ for you and another 40 or 50 percent are good ‘Rational’ customers. Then a small percentage are what we call ‘Ambivalents’, ‘Stalkers’ or ‘Opponents’. What you should do is take your Opponents by the hand and walk them down to your competitor’s office and say “There you go…”
Bobby: “…here’s the guy you’ve been looking for…”
John: Yes. Basically you should not be afraid of sacking customers that you can’t service properly.
Bobby: So it’s almost like putting your hands up and saying “You know what, you’d be better off going elsewhere” and hoping that they will go elsewhere and cost your competitor money?
John: It is. But if you have those hard conversations… honest conversations… with the customer, either you will turn that relationship around or they’ll move off and allow you to spend time with the clients that you can really do some good for.
Getting your clients to design your products
Bobby: It’s interesting what you say, John. You know, we look at customers almost on a product basis. In other words: I make this product, I sell it to the customer, I’m finished with him now I want to find the next customer. Once the sale is made, that’s the end of the journey. But it’s only really the beginning. Is that right?
John: Yes, but but it’s also the wrong starting point for the journey. If you have a product-centric mindset, you are basically building something that you hope somebody is going to buy. A much better way is working with your customers to try to craft the next generation of products or the next set of widgets that you’re going to manufacture. Because once they are manufactured, the client has already bought them. After all, they’ve actually help you to design them in the first place. And very few companies have figured out how to do that properly.
Customer-Centred Leaders
Bobby: And when you talk about leadership, what are the customer-centred leadership traits that you would see in an organisation.
John: First of all I would say but if you haven’t got good leadership in an organisation, you’re never going to transform the company to being customer centric. The companies that have done very well are ones where you have a really, really passionate leader who does put the customer at the heart of everything. The second thing is that they intuitively understand that by doing the right thing for the customer, the profits will follow. The third thing is they are also very good at executing a plan or a strategy to put the customer at the heart of everything. Now they can be ‘Big Picture’ people but they know how to put together a team that will get things done, and will be relentless about making sure that it happens.
Bobby: When you look at the challenges of big organisations like utility companies, banks… you know: those organisations that everybody loves to hate where they provide a service based automated telephone answering machines… How can those organisations become customer-centric in a real way?
John: Well the focus of our book was business-to-business organisations. We were very lucky and got to talk to people like Gavin Patterson, the CEO of BT but it was very much on the B2B side of things. We talked to David Thodey in Australia who was CEO of Telstra, their biggest telecommunications company. We talked to people in eBay, HP and Atos but the focus was really more on B2B. Regardless of the industry, you can be either very customer-centric or not at all. And if you’re not at all customer-centric, that’s a pretty difficult place to be.
Culture change
Bobby: When you talk about culture in a company, the culture can sometimes turn sour. How can you use the customer to enact change in the company’s culture?
John: Well, one of the other traits of being a good customer-centric leader is that you never let a good crisis go to waste. A lot of good leaders will use the customer as a platform to try to change the culture of the organisation. They’re constantly talk about the last customer visit that they had, the last product that they developed in conjunction with that customer. By continually doing that and by getting the customer into every discussion, people in organisations will start to follow the direction of their leaders.
Bobby: And finally, John, is it true that if you can get the customer to be your ambassador – in other words, the customer is talking about your business being the best business known to man – that’s the most powerful advocate that you can have? It trumps any advertising or any marketing that any company could do?
John: Absolutely. We called those ‘Ambassadors’ and as I said, about a third of your customers should be ‘Ambassadors.’ Even if another 40% are ‘Rationals’ who don’t believe you are truly “unique” but they are good customers all the same, those Ambassadors and Rationals are the clients that will deliver your sales for the rest of this year and into the following years.
Bobby: Well it’s a fascinating subject. John O’Connor is the CEO of Cork-based company Deep-Insight and the co-author of that new book on customer centric organisations. Thanks very much for joining us, John.
If you’re interested if throwing your name in the hat for a free electronic copy, all you need to go to our Contact Us page and tell us that you’d like to enter. Easier still, just send us an email with the phrase Customer At The Heart in the subject of your message. 
