Every business is now an e-business. Every organization is an e-organization. Today’s customers expect to have visibility into your company electronically. They want to be able to gather a lot of information about your products and services by searching online. They need to be able to do business electronically through self-service channels, when and how they choose. Today’s customers expect to be able to access your company’s internal business processes—e.g., what inventory is available where, or how to diagnose and repair something—from your Web site or from their own SmartPhones. Customers also expect to be able to see and to manage all the information you’ve gathered about them. They’re nonplussed if they can’t.

For any company that started in business before the late 1990’s, there is still a transition to be made from an organization that is designed around internally-optimized processes and one that is optimized to make it easy for customers to do business electronically. For new businesses that were spawned during the Internet era, there are still lessons to be learned about how to design an e-business from the customers’ perspective—from the outside in.

In Part 2 of our Customers.com^® Handbook, we offer a simple set of guidelines to ensure that you’ve got the basics covered as you implement or refine any customer-impacting business process.

To set your Customers.com^® vision in motion, there will be cultural, process, and organizational issues to overcome.

Refining Your E-Business & Outside In Approach

The idea of making it easy for customers to do business with you is simple. But implementing this vision is hard. What we’ve learned from watching the companies that excel is that it takes at least two years to begin to make headway. This work requires a visionary leader, typically someone with a marketing bent and background as well as strong leadership and cooperation from operations, sales, and IT. It requires a lot of perseverance. It requires a good deal of investment. It requires a unique partnership between business pragmatists and information technology visionaries. And it requires buy-in and participation from the entire organization. No matter where your organization is on the Customers.com continuum, you’ll find that starting from the outside in—focusing on making it easy for your customers to interact with your organization electronically (and through other means) in order to get things done is a good way to overcome organizational inertia. Here are some suggestions about how to move forward.

Overcoming the Organizational Obstacles

Piecemeal vs. Holistic Approach

Many of the companies we’ve met with are caught in the same dilemma. They want to evolve their e-business initiatives to be more modern, more functional, and more streamlined, but they’re caught in organizational paralysis that prevents them from tackling the big picture. Instead, they use a piecemeal approach. Web sites proliferate for different product lines, geographies, and business units, sponsored by different P&Ls. The marketing department launches a data warehousing project to do business analytics so they can make more personalized offers. The sales VP deploys a new opportunity management system for his field force. Distributors, resellers, brokers, agents, or other partners are requesting online access to the applications and information they need to do their jobs, and their customers—your mutual customers—have to jump through disjointed online sites and/or call different phone numbers, armed with different account or contract numbers, in order to get things done. Customers and partners are still finding it hard to do business with you because you haven’t taken a unified approach: An approach that starts with what the customers need to get done. Your employees valiantly try to make everything appear seamless and straightforward, but they have to log onto multiple systems and/or to circumvent outdated policies in order to make it easy for your customers and partners to do business with you and to get things done.

Success Not Guaranteed

Even when everyone in your organization—from CEO to line-of-business managers, sales and marketing executives, and information technologists—is aligned in the commitment to make it easier for customers to do business with you, without a clear game plan and corporate dollars allocated, your project could well falter at the starting gate.

So what’s the answer? Here is the actual sequence of events that we recommend you follow to get a successful Customers.com^® initiative underway or re-started.

Step 1: Set the Vision in Motion

Executive Visionary

In all the case studies we’ve examined, there has been one common element: a highly placed visionary who clearly saw the value and potential of using electronic self-serve technologies to make it easy for customers to do business with the organization. Although visionaries can come from any position in the organization, realistically they need to be high up enough on the corporate ladder to get the ears of the top executives. They need to have achieved a high level of trust in the company. And they need to be risk takers. Launching new customer-interaction initiatives is not a simple task. It requires commitment, time, and money before you can even begin.

In almost all the cases we’ve studied, the vision was set by someone at the V.P. level or higher. In only one case was the initiative led by the head of customer support. There’s overwhelming evidence that these initiatives do best when they’re led by either the head of sales or marketing or spearheaded by the head of the company or the person chartered with developing new business opportunities. Of course, titles and clout differ in different organizations, so here’s how to think about who you need to lead this charge. Who holds the purse strings in your organization? Which function has the most clout? If yours is a sales-driven culture, you need to drive your e-business and customer-centric initiatives from sales. If yours is an execution-driven culture, drive from operations. If yours is an engineering-driven culture, drive from engineering. If new financial services and products get the most attention in the C-Suite, drive from your new products group. In short, hook your customers.com initiative(s) to the part of your company that has the most clout. Your visionary needs to emerge from that group and/or be wholeheartedly backed by that group.

Widespread Acceptance

Even when the visionary is high up in the corporation, she cannot succeed without consensus, and this consensus needs to come from all levels, not just from executives. Of course, without executive support, there would be no mandate to succeed and no funding to allow it to happen. And, truth to tell, sometimes it’s all about funding. Money tends to set priorities, and if you want your Customers.com^® program to be a corporate priority, it must be visibly well funded. Ideally, you should be spending 10 percent of your operational budget on customer-centric initiatives. However, most of our visionaries get by with much less than that—more like 2 to 3 percent.

Your customer-centric initiatives and vision also need the support of the managers, who are going to need to change how they run their departments, and, equally important, of the people who are actually going to be on the front line, interacting daily with the customers. Not only do front line people understand fully what the customers’ issues are, they are the ones with the power to make your initiative work or to sabotage the whole thing. Remember, you will be asking them to change the way they perform their jobs, and that is a very frightening concept to most people. You need to have them on your side right from the beginning.