“Over 70% of businesses forecast performances they will never attain”
That’s a quote from Bain & Company research. Keep this in the back of your mind.
It’s September. The month when companies kick-off their intense annual budgeting rounds. Budgeting is probably the number one distraction among C-level executives and what suffers is strategy design and implementation. Chris Zook, partner at Bain and author of ‘unstoppable‘, mentions that on average top managers spend 5% of their time on strategy definition.
Question for these executives: What if you cut just 5% of your time wasted allocated to forecast company performances, and devote it to customer-facing activities? My three pieces of advice:
- Spend (more) time listening to your customers. Talking is fine too, probably better, but scarier. Three customer calls a day? You can even do this indirectly — web analytics reports tell you what people search for, voice of the customer programs give you the complaints from last week, or just check what is written by customers in their emails to Support.
- Experience mission-critical customer journeys. Are you with a bank? Try to fill in some online application forms for an insurance product. Executives including the CEO at Credit Suisse already do this frequently. You with an utilities company? Measure the time it takes from finding Customer Support’s phone number until actually talking to an agent. Believe me, you will be surprised when you drive home at night.
- Walk down to the Market(ing) Research department. Executives all agree that to grow you need to innovate, and to innovate you need to create a deep understanding of customers (source: BCG). The good news is that executives are very confident that their internal processes work well to uncover latent needs. The bad news: they believe that ‘not enough customer insight’ is currently a major show-stopper in achieving innovation. So my advice: figure out where and why Research lacks effectiveness.
Looking forward hearing what you found. ;-)
