How to evolve to make your company more customer-focused

Key quotes:

• "Younger, smaller companies perhaps have an advantage, building agile principles into the way they work from the start."
• "I’ll see if I can help itemize the places to focus on building agility and some of the approaches you might consider."
• "I’ve seen it enough times to know that no matter what the company culture, it is 100% possible to build a healthy agile team mindset from the bottom-up."
• "You might start with one team, working on one product, managing their own backlog."
• "It’s almost always possible to get that team what they need, including the people with all of the necessary skills, a dedicated product owner, a scrum master or agile lead, and a delivery manager all working toward the goals set by a business sponsor."
• "This is how many agile cultures start, as an experiment with middle management support."

Key quotes:

• "All organizations and companies need to evolve and diversify their approach to customers."
• "An organization must give importance to the needs of the customers and design their culture by satisfying their demands."
• "Focusing on your customers may sound like a fairly straightforward process."
• "Collect feedback regularly: The first step in developing a customer-focused culture is listening to what your customers have to say."
• "For customer-facing employees, the most straightforward approach is simply to ask for feedback during regular interactions."
• "Always look for product improvement: To fulfill the needs of the customers, services, and products offered by you must resonate with customer’s demand and fulfill their satisfaction."

Key quotes:

• "The world of work is changing and with it company cultures and management practices."
• "Companies need to therefore improve the quality of products and services that support it at every touch point to limit the intent to leave."
• "Companies today are shifting from ownership to shared services and in doing so have access to technology and platforms which would have been previously unreachable."
• "Even physical products are supported by digital services and such services need to continuously keep up with the trends on mobile platforms, changing behaviours and social interactions."
• "Ironically this is where we begin to learn most about our customers needs.” — products vs projects Budgets One of the biggest issues enterprises face today is the application and management of the annual budget."
• "Enterprises who wish to grow and innovate should consider the duality in funding new ideas differently to managing mature products in the portfolio."

Key quotes:

• "Of course, it can be discussed how the long-term effect of selling unappealing products to customers could potentially backfire on future new sales rate due to bad reputation etc, but you get the point."
• "However, once a contract was signed, the norm was still that customer was “locked-in” for years, so in that way business revenue was still secured and acquiring new customers was still the main driver for growth."
• "Thus, acquiring that new customer no longer secure long-term growth for businesses, as knowing about their other options, existing customers basically can decide to leave tomorrow if they don’t like your product or service."
• "Customer Success is not just a new, fancy and flattery word for Customer Support or Customer Service (which is sometimes what I feel people think when I talk about it, unless they already are familiar with the term or the SaaS world)."
• "Furthermore, Customer Success informs strategy; it helps businesses better understand the customer experience and lifecycle so they can improve it."

Key quotes:

• "If you’re like many scaling companies, being customer centric early on helped make you — but as you mature, you lose some of that focus."
• "Employees understand the needs and desires of the people they are serving, and this is reflected through increased loyalty, lower churn, less internal strife, more loveable products, and more effective team decision-making."
• "Empirically, customer intimacy and centricity can be measured by metrics such as word-of-mouth (more), product adoption rate (high), churn (low), and NPS (growing relative score + higher than benchmark for your industry)."
• "It gives every team member time to connect and listen to customers, as well as context to understand customers better from firsthand conversations."
• "There is no better way to form a lasting, meaningful, and close connection between company leadership and your most valued customers."
• "Customer events let your company connect with existing customers (and nothing builds customer intimacy faster than face-to-face contact) — but they’re also a great chance to get new ones."