How to adopt customer centricity

Achieving customer centricity is a multi-pronged strategy that begins with optimising business processes to facilitate customer-oriented activities.

Customer-centric business processes are characterised by, first, being engineered to provide people with an accurate contextual view of the customer; secondly, by focusing on customer-oriented outcomes; and third, by exhibiting low human latency.

For instance, a purchase-order fulfilment process that does not consider a customer's ordering history as a source of insight to recommend alternatives in cases where the item being ordered is out of stock, is less customer-centric than one that does.

On the other hand, a business process that includes placing a call to the customer - a business process that specifies an action - to notify them that the item they ordered is out of stock, and based on their ordering history, the company will be more than happy to ship a different brand (the one the customer ordered in the past) as an alternative at a discounted price, is even more customer-centric.

Moreover, a business process that allows the customer service representative to reach out to the people fulfilling the customer order to instruct them, in real-time, to ship the alternative item overnight is even more customer-centric than the previous two.

This last bit, the act of reaching out to other people to accelerate the outcome, is what I mean by exhibiting low human latency, and it's what differentiates a plain old business process from a communication-enabled business processes (CEBP).

Humans are wired for communication, but not so much for collaboration.

Dave Paulding is Interactive Intelligence's regional sales manager for UK and Africa.

CEBPs are business processes wired for collaboration through communication. The goal of enabling a business process with communication features is to provide a set of channels to enable those parts of a business process where collaboration helps maximise the quality of the process outcomes, helps keep the process going, or prevents it from slowing down or stopping altogether.

On a philosophical level, the idea behind CEBPs is rooted in the notion that humans are wired for communication, but not so much for collaboration. Humans are social animals, but that does not necessarily mean they are built to collaborate efficiently with each other.

Regarding being wired for communication, like most species on this planet, humans are very communicative animals (some more than others) and their ability to create language as a coding system to express ideas proves this point.

People's bodies have evolved to have the anatomical features that allow them to talk, and not just grunt and howl at each other - well, this is still done in general, but that's another story. In short, communication is natural to people, and they will communicate no matter what; even when they have nothing important to say (Twitter anyone?).

Collaboration, on the other hand, is trickier. As mentioned above, humans are social animals but human nature is not necessarily wired for co-operation. Instead, humans seem to be wired for survival at a very individualistic level.

Human brains have evolved to understand that co-operation is a more cost-effective way to survive than going it alone, and arguably, having learned to internalise that understanding is what makes humans civilised. However, collaboration is learned behaviour, and that's why it doesn't come as naturally as communication.

So, when the two are put together and people end up participating in a CEBP, having the ability to communicate with others doesn't mean much unless they have something to talk about, ie, a context.

CEBPs enhance human participation and help engage people in ways that work for them. For some people, engagement means monitoring e-mail every five seconds. For others it means picking up the phone to ask questions, while for others, it means keeping an instant messaging session with another person open just in case.

Customer-centric business processes are CEBPs whose context is the customer. Their only goal is to make sure customers get what they need, that their questions do not go unanswered and that they will be satisfied with the outcome.

Having business processes tuned for customer centricity is only half the story, though. True customer centricity depends as much on business processes as on the people executing them on behalf of customers.

Giving people the right tools to take advantage of everything a customer-centric business process can provide is crucial to achieving ROI and to ensuring high levels of customer satisfaction.