Customer obsession has become a competitive necessity. Recent research shows that customer experience leaders grow revenues 4-8% above market average. However, many organizations struggle to truly put the customer first, often lip-serving rather than fundamentally transforming systems, processes and culture around user needs.
As heads of product, Chief Product Officers (CPOs) are uniquely positioned to drive customer-centricity. By providing executive leadership, influence and accountability for customer outcomes, CPOs can reorient organizations around user value versus internal efficiencies or legacy business models.
Anchor in customer insights
Too often, product roadmaps reflect internal assumptions versus having a rich, empirical understanding of target users and their unmet needs. CPOs must champion processes for continuous customer learning and engagement. This means instituting practices like quarterly customer advisory boards, building user research capabilities and leveraging data to glean granular behavioral insights.
Rather than making intermittent outbound sales calls, teams should have always-on digital feedback channels to quickly gather input at scale. Customer sentiment tracking should inform strategy and roadmaps. And CPOs should widely evangelize compelling insights across organizations to inspire customer focus.
Reimagine experiences around journeys
Organizations often develop products in a disjointed manner, with siloed teams tackling individual applications, channels or transactions. CPOs should foster a journey-based approach that considers the end-to-end experience across touchpoints from the user perspective.
This means bringing cross-functional teams together to map key journeys – like onboarding, service issue resolution or contract renewal. And then brainstorming creative ways to simplify cumbersome steps, introduce automation and personalization, and otherwise transform the journey for ease, enjoyment and outcomes.
Measure what matters
Legacy metrics like sales quotas, production targets and utilization rates are inward-looking and incentivize organizational behaviors that don’t necessarily translate to customer value. CPOs should champion customer result-oriented metrics and OKRs. Relevant metrics might address adoption, retention, satisfaction, usage levels, loyalty, referrals and other actual customer behaviors.
Making customer metrics the most visible and celebrated – over lagging ones like revenue which is a derivative output – helps reinforce that winning with users is what matters most. This keeps teams focused on creating outcomes and experiences that customers intrinsically appreciate and engage with.
Foster customer-centric culture
Becoming truly customer-obsessed requires cultural change as much as process change. CPOs play an integral role in shaping workplace culture. They should consciously foster values like user empathy, craftsmanship and personal accountability at the team level.
And model customer-centered behaviors like inviting frontline agents to product design sessions, frequent site visits to experience things firsthand and participating in sales calls to incorporate live user feedback. Reframing conversations around “our customers” versus “the business” helps the organization think like customer advocates. Celebrating wins that create outlier customer experiences rather than operating efficiencies also roots culture in an outside-in mindset.
While long the banner cry, few established enterprises achieve the customer-centricity aspired to today. As stewards of product, design and associated experiences, CPOs are paramount to realizing this transformation. With executive backing, they can inject process, metrics and cultural elements that finally place users at the heart of operations. And in doing so, open up tremendous growth opportunities through better nurturing customer relationships over time.
Image Source: pexels.com
