Making customer centricity visible Increase in value through a customer-centric organisation

Customer experience ensures added value.

Global value creation is developing into an experience economy: the customer experience becomes the primary product. Only an experience design that is relevant to customers will enable businesses to differentiate themselves from competitors and justify higher price levels. The quality and relevance of this experience design thus increasingly determine economic success.

Customer experiences are only the tip of an iceberg. Many different factors influence the quality of the experience. In successful companies, the employees are the prerequisite and the lever for a good experience. In the end, everyone in the company contributes to what the customer experiences – whether they work in sales, service, IT or accounting.

Companies that succeed in the experience economy maintain a constant overview and centre all they do on the customers and their experience: They are consistently and holistically customer centric. Many companies, however, lack a holistic view. Many elements are not considered to be “customer-relevant” and therefore remain hidden under the surface.

Most companies struggle to align their offers with customer expectations. Whether they are improving in this can be checked to utilise critical indicators such as the Net Promoter Score (NPS).

But the role of employees in a customer-centred experience, whether directly or indirectly involved, is rarely assessed. Many companies do not know where they stand in terms of the customer-centricity of their employees.

It is now possible to verify the level of customer-centricity in a company. The Customer Centricity Score™ is the first empirically developed indicator indicating the status of customer-centricity of all employees within a company.

By utilising a representative survey in a company, the score is presented on a scale between -100 (avers) to +100 (centred), calculating the difference between positive and negative answers to a predefined catalogue of questions.

CCScore measures customer centricity using three dimensions: leadership, collaboration, implementation. Employees evaluate 15 items in the three dimensions. By differentiation in analogy to NPS and aggregation of item values and dimension values to an overall CCScore, one can make differentiated statements about the customer-centricity of the organisation.

Leadership

The management creates the framework conditions for customer centricity to be lived throughout the entire organisation.

The five leadership factors are:

1. prioritisation
2. commitment
3. enabling
4. openness
5. incentives

Collaboration

A reflected, open and tolerant approach, across all organisational units, enables customer-centred collaboration.

The five factors of cooperation are:

1. error culture
2. persistence
3. learning culture
4. cross-functional cooperation
5. touchpoint interaction

Implementation

The implementation of customer-centric processes and systems creates relevant offers and holistic customer experiences.

The five implementation factors are:

1. customer insight
2. experience design
3. customer integration
4. personal agility
5. implementation support

It takes about 10 minutes per employee to complete the questionnaire. The questions posed in such a way that all employees can answer them.
The score-values can be shown and compared using company-specific and demographic variables. Examples of this are organisational units, roles/activities of employees, age or length of service.

Contact person for the survey: The team

The CCScore is defined by utilising a survey of the employees (total or sample).

The survey takes just under ten minutes; all that is required is a web browser with an Internet connection. The average field time running a CCScore™ study is about four weeks.

After completion of the survey, experts evaluate the CCScore and formulate an interpretation. Any improvement measures can be derived directly from the results, depending on the scope of the project.