How to Architect Customer Centric Organization

Customer-centric enterprise vision, strategy and governance model should enforce alignment of the various silos towards customer-centric products and delivery mechanisms.

The ultimate goal of the customer-centric organization is to architect an organization to bring value to customers in ways that are beneficial for them while also creating added value for the company itself. What approach do you take to architect a customer-centric organization?

1. Bridge Strategy & Execution, Connect Customer TouchPoints, & Mind Gap of Functional Silos. Customer-centric enterprise vision, strategy and governance model should enforce alignment of the various silos towards customer-centric products and delivery mechanisms. This also provides the potential for enterprise effectiveness and efficiency. Customer experience comes from all touchpoints, yet organizations are structured by departments and it hinders a company’s ability to create value. Most organizations are organized in silos. How would you ensure that all structures, processes and strategy alignment around excellent customer experience to result in a profitable and evolving business? How would you model different value propositions to different customer segments yet developing and offering the product and services using the same or similar business capabilities? In certain cases, different customer segments want the same experience but they want it delivered through different ways and channels.  

2. EA framework should offer approaches/viewpoints for modeling total customer experience. EA is the way to create (and maintain) many different coherent views. Such as views for each stakeholder (including customers in this case) and views for each "big" concern. Outside -in-process approach is one way but again it's only about process, it does not tell you who is adding value on each activity in the process and how these values are summed up to the ultimate customer value. Customers don’t want to know how the internal business operates; they tend to think about what experience they would get when they buy a product/service from the business.     
       
3. Engaging customers directly on an ongoing basis to see how their goals are changing is a good way to architect customer-centric organizations. By understanding customer goals, an organization could also develop better interaction capabilities to enhance customer experience. There are frequently “fundamental differences” between the organization's view of value and that of customers and consumers, and sometimes, "Customer-Centric Organization" means very different things to different people. Find out what the business means by this terminology and where and to which extent it is "real". It is unlikely that the business will commit to doing anything the customer asks for and it will be more evident in areas of customer communications, sales marketing, and support, than in finance.  

4. Forecast future behavior: Approaches to building business intelligence upon customers tend to look at the past behavior of individuals to try to determine the segments that they belong to and forecast future behavior. Decision Management manages customer treatment decisions as corporate assets and each customer decision is considered individually. These decision assets are identified, modeled, enhanced by analytics and business know-how, checked for compliance, evaluated for risk and delivered to the multi-channel systems. 

5. EA needs to define WHAT the business does or must do to create value for customers. Once, it is realized that the organization has to move to a customer-centric organization, how would EA define the building blocks for business transformation; what tools and artifacts (road-mapping, etc) would you create to ensure that business is evolving towards the customer-centric vision? 

6. People Perspective: Superior customer services are provided by dedicated employees: Customer experience depends very much on employees’ behavior and knowledge/skills they possess. So, companies should develop a training program to equip their employees to deliver the customer experience so that they could offer support and advice to their customers with the right information at the right time. 

A customer-centric organization is agile to adapt to change, intelligent to make the timely decision, resilient to risk, and elastic to scale up & down seamlessly.

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Posted in: Customer Service,Digital Master,EA