Companies can convince themselves that they’re “customer-centric” by talking about it and giving motivational speeches. But they fail because they don’t back their words with action and mechanisms. It is just wishful thinking.
Being customer-centric means defining, measuring, and analyzing metrics that reflect the customer experience. This means measuring the speed, cost, and quality of the CX from the customer’s perspective.
For Lyft, that means measuring the TP 50, 70, and 90 time from ride request to pickup.
For Salesforce, it means measuring how their software provides marginal gains in customers’ speed to close, conversion rates, revenue per sales $ spent, and so on.
For Starbucks, that means the TP 50, 70, and 90 time from customer arrival in the store to having the drink they ordered at the right temperature (% right/wrong order) in hand.
In e-commerce, it means the time for a customer to find, add to cart, pay, and receive the correct item at the best price.
One of the things that drives me crazy is when it is obvious that a company and its execs aren’t measuring speed, cost, and quality from the customer’s point of view. Instead, all of their metrics are financial outputs. They add steps in the customer flow that obviously degrade the customer-facing metrics in favor of upselling.
Picking on airlines is unsporting because they are such easy targets. Still, their purchase flows are horrendously long, loaded with annoying upselling, and they fail at the basics — like easy, rapid payment processing.
Throughout my time at Amazon and subsequent work as a consultant, I have learned that what separates companies that say they are customer-centric from those that are customer-centric is the CEO and Exec team’s commitment to defining, measuring, analyzing, and improving hundreds of customer experience input metrics.
One example of a customer experience metric at Amazon is the “click-to-deliver time.” This measures the time from when a customer places an order to when they receive the item. We knew this was a meaningful metric because customers care about getting their items faster. If we had prioritized tracking units shipped, we could have easily claimed victory while orders arrived late, were missing, or were damaged. Click-to-deliver time forced us to focus on what the customer actually experiences and cares about.
Another example is the defect rate. This included anything that required the customer to contact us (a damaged item, an incorrect charge, a login issue, or anything else that created friction).
The real work of being customer-centric starts by asking: “What are the metrics that truly reflect whether our customers are having a great experience?” Then you must commit to taking these metrics as seriously (or more) than the ones that go into a quarterly earnings call.
