Acting as an “Internal Advocate”

At a time when customer purchase behavior is changing, customer focus has been a major emphasis for companies trying to maintain revenue gains. Our sister program, the Marketing Leadership Council found that in the B2B space customers are, on average, 57% of the way through their purchase decision process before they even begin commercial conversations.

This more cautious purchasing approach – reluctance to even contact vendors, let alone fully engage with them – means that companies need to work harder than ever to ensure a positive total customer experience. Failure in any of the multiple touchpoints between a company and its customers will make it easy for the sale to fall through. Sellers are walking on thin ice.

Despite this, our research with Quality executives at the Operations Leadership Exchange finds that few companies have an effective customer touchpoint framework. Without this kind of guide to the total customer experience, customer-facing activities can quickly become uncoordinated – and that can do more harm than good.

The Customer Advocate

Companies need an internal “customer advocate” to identify and direct activities towards true customer needs. Although common in fields like social work and health care, advocates can be helpful whenever one player in a system – in this case, the customer – is unable to take full advantage of opportunities available to them. When customers can’t fully exploit a company’s offerings, both sides lose.

A customer advocate should do three things:

• Understand Customer Needs
• Protect Customer Interests
• Communicate Opportunities Available to Customers

The effect is to drive greater customer value.

Quality’s unique opportunity

Although each part of the organization operates with the customer’s benefit in mind, few are equipped to take on a comprehensive view of the customer’s real needs. A customer advocate must carry a unique combination of analytic skills, process rigor, and a naturally unbiased view across the entire enterprise, a set of skills commonly found within Quality organizations. But our conversations with Quality executives tell us that they have traditionally played only a minor role in driving proactive customer experience enhancements, instead investing their customer-focused efforts on reactive product quality projects and issue resolution. As the relationships between companies and their customers continue to evolve – and particularly in a prolonged and difficult selling environment – Quality should take the opportunity to step into the customer advocate role.

What CEB is Doing for its Members

The Operations Leadership Exchange is helping its members to protect and enhance the customer experience in several ways:

1. Expanding Quality’s customer analytics from product efficacy to also include tracking customer goal achievement. We’ve documented how The Lego Group’s Quality organization does this by breaking down the concept of product usability — whether customers can use their products in ways that are meaningful to them — into more measurable outcomes (long-term usability, emotional usability, and functional usability), and evaluating that usability across the product life-cycle.
2. Helping business partners understand how their actions create or destroy customer value. Our research identified approaches that companies like CHEP use to build a Customer Loyalty Steering Committee, co-chaired by Quality and Sales, that reviews all internal process changes for potential customer impact.
3. Ensuring customer communication actively demonstrates how the company is creating value for them. Although not typically on the customer front-lines, Quality has an important role to play ensuring commercial interactions clearly articulate the benefits of investments made on their behalf. Operations Leadership Exchange members can learn how the Quality organization at EADS, for example, has constructed a regular cadence of customer communication to demonstrate process improvements based on their feedback.

In addition to accessing the resources highlighted here, Operations Leadership Exchange members can learn more about how Quality can enhance its role as a customer advocate by visiting the research brief on our web site.