What
have we learned from the e-business leaders we profiled in 1998 (and from watching
their successes since that time) that could help you determine what key roles
you’ll need to implement a cross-channel Custom-ers.com strategy? Rather
than give you a set of job descriptions you’d need for any Web project
(which you can find in any book on Web development), let’s look at your
company as a whole. Here is a new way to think about a governance structure
and few key roles that, with the right people in them, could shift your organization
from internally-driven to become a customer-adaptive organization.
They are:
1. A Customer Experience Owners’ Board at the executive level
2. Customer Segment Owners with P&L responsibility
3. Customer Communities for each customer segment
4. A Customer Experience SVP with budget and clout in a business development
role
What Kind of Organizational Structure and Roles Do You Need for a Customers.com
Company?
What We Learned from Customers.com Classic that Still Applies:
E-Business Lets You Design Quickly from the Outside In
The business leaders that we profiled in the original Customers.com in 1998
(many of whom are still in trusted leadership positions in their firms),
were not C-level executives. They were directors, managers, and, in some
cases, VPs. But they did have purview over a customer-critical interaction
touchpoint: their company’s Web site. They drove their Web initiatives
with a single-minded focus: “How can we use the Web to make it easier
for our prospects and customers to do business with us?” These e-business
leaders had sponsorship and air cover from high-level executives. They also
had reasonable, but not large, budgets that they didn’t have to beg
for. They had the resources and the purview to get things done without asking
permission all the time. Most of all, they had the freedom to follow their
instincts and to learn and adapt based on customers’ online interactions.
They were able to design and deploy customer-facing tools and publish information
that was important to customers’ ability to get things done.
E-Business Requires Redesign of Processes and Systems
By the mid-2000s, many e-business leaders in large companies, including many
of the visionaries profiled in Customers.com Classic, began running into
organizational barriers. As the self-service tools customers used on the
Web began to demand major changes in companies’ internal IT systems
and business processes, many e-business leaders hit a temporary wall. I had
many heartfelt conversations with them as they described the intransigence
of their CIOs and business leaders when it came to “opening up” internal
business processes to make them more customer-adaptive. Yet, in company after
company, the e-business leaders began to win. Why? Because they had the customers
on their side. I recall vividly one conversation I had with a high-ranking
e-business exec whose CEO had finally called the CIO into the room with her
(her title was VP E-Business at the time), pointed to her and said, “Sandra
now owns all of our non-manufacturing IT; get out of her way, and do what
she needs.”
Other e-business leaders made organizational progress in less confrontational
ways. Bill Barker, head of customer portals for Boeing (before the term “customer
portal” had really been invented), took the seductive approach. He
made it so easy for any line of business within Boeing to hook their application
and information into Boeing’s customer self-service portals that product
and service groups began competing with one another to empower their customers
by providing them self-service access to Boeing’s most useful tools
(diagnostics, repair manuals, real-time access to global spare parts inventory,
etc.).
E-Business Requires a Cross-Touchpoint Purview
Several of the e-business initiatives described in Customers.com Classic were
actually multi-touchpoint initiatives. Wells Fargo, Bell Atlantic (now Verizon),
Dell, Cisco, Boeing, PhotoDisc (now Getty Images), and General Motors’ initiatives,
among others, all streamlined information and tools for contact center reps—the
people who answered customers’ phone calls. As these companies rolled
out customer self-service tools on the Internet, they redesigned their call
center operations to ensure that front-line customer service employees had
the same (or better) information and support that customers had.
Back then, in the late 1990s, it wasn’t terribly easy to use the same
technology platforms for both call centers and Web sites, but these e-business/customer
experience leaders paved the way for what has now become the holy grail: an
integrated self-service and assisted-service environment for customers, employees,
and partners, whether they choose to interact by email, instant messaging/chat,
talking to someone, searching and navigating, videoconferencing, tapping into
an online customer community, or meeting face to face.
Customer (Self-) Service is a Priority
A customer-centric organization requires much more than a world-class e-business
operation. But I would argue that you can’t really have a customer-centric
organization today without world-class customer self-service operations,
including, but not limited to, your Web site(s).
Does that mean you shouldn’t have people available to help people? Of
course not. Some of the best brands in the world provide high touch pre- and
post-sales service. But they also ensure that prospects and customers can figure
out how to get things done on their own.
Start with the Internet to Organize Your Customer-Centric Business
I still believe firmly that if you want to make your organization easy to do
business with, you should start with the Web—design your Web sites
to address the most critical scenarios of each of your most important customer
segments. Continuously monitor and improve how easy it is for prospects and
customers to get things done. At the same time, notice what they’re
trying to do and/or looking for that they’re not able to do. That will
give you some good clues about a) what they need and b) what your competitors
are up to.
Then use what you learn on the Web to roll out appropriate mobile applications
and resources. Build customer communities to be the core of your customer
support and marketing efforts.
Does that mean putting your e-business staff in charge of your company? (Maybe
not a bad idea!) No, it probably means taking what we’ve learned from
designing agile, customer-responsive Web sites and applying those learnings
to how we design and run our businesses, starting with how we organize.