How Marketing Can Drive Process Improvement
To keep their companies in shape, managers must explain to employees what customers experience and what they expect. The head of marketing is usually in charge of gathering market research on customers and their expectations. Most of the marketing leaders I know gather “voice of the customer” research for product design decisions, but they don’t do enough to help employees understand what customers expect. They don’t create an ethic of being truly customer-driven. Here are three ways to do it.
1: The marketing leader brings customer research to life for employees by creating personas.
Most employees don’t read customer research data; they find it neither compelling nor interesting. But they do react to stories, especially those that emphasize the importance of their role in the company and how it affects how the customer feels. Consider the case of “Al and Betty” at Grainger, the $7 billion supplies distributor. The company’s U.S. leadership team understood that, to get every employee to connect with customers, they had to find a way to give “the customer” a name and a face. Their process began with the question, “Who are our customers?” The leadership team realized that there were two types of customers. The first was named “Al,” a plant maintenance professional. His job is to make sure the facility is running, so he is motivated by time. He needs to get Grainger products, such as pumps, mechanical equipment and electrical supplies, quickly. The image the leaders created of Al had a clock. The second was given the name “Betty.” She is the purchasing manager at her company. She wants the best deals on the products and services her company needs. Betty’s image had a dollar sign on it. Grainger’s leaders used Al to help employees in the company’s North American branch offices think about their service process from the customer’s perspective. They explained how Al usually comes to a branch to place an order and that he wants to get in and out quickly. At other times, he comes in with a broken product. Then he stands at the counter and works with the Grainger people to solve the problem. Since this is often complex, for example a part for a 40-year-old boiler, it can take 30 to 45 minutes to find the right solution. Thinking about these two very different reasons why Al comes to Grainger, the branch managers realized that they had not designed the interaction to optimize both kinds of experience. Now, employees are redesigning the experiences from Al’s point of view, with the benefit of customers’ ideas and feedback.
2: The marketing leader promotes experiments with customers to improve their buying decisions.
Another way for marketing leaders to bring the customer experience into the organization is by developing a deep understanding of the customer’s decision process and finding a way to improve it. For example, one of the reasons Netflix¹ has thrived is that it recommends movies you would like to watch, based on your ratings of other movies you have seen before. Amazon.com² does the same thing with books, based on what other people have bought. Helping customers with their buying process can change their relationship with a supplier from “vendor” to “partner.” Using tried-and-true process improvement techniques, marketing leaders can help their organizations co-create new processes and offerings with their customers, and even involve suppliers. For example, Grainger formed brand management teams for each customer segment to identify solutions that lead to bottom-line improvements. Using continuous improvement methods, a team first tests a new offering with a small group of customers to see how it resonates. If the answer is yes, the team then determines the most effective methods of building capabilities in its sales team to deliver the new offering to customers. Based on a small-scale test, they make adjustments, and they launch broadly only when they have the right results from both tests: a measurable positive impact on the customer and a reliable sales process.
3: The marketing leader spends time with employees who work with customers and is an advocate for them internally.
In an earlier post, “Customer-Centered Continuous Improvement”, I wrote that a company’s ability to stay focused on process improvement depends on getting executives out of their offices and engaging them with customers. More than anyone else in the company’s leadership, the marketing leader needs to spend time with employees who are in contact with customers and be the customers’ advocate. For example, Bob Coggin, the former Senior Vice President of marketing at Delta Air Lines, had breakfast once a month with a few employees (between 12 and 16) who dealt with customers. He asked them to tell him what they needed to deliver a better product. Once every quarter he hosted a session with all the frontline managers and brought in customers who could publicly share their experiences with the company.
Have you seen the marketing leader successfully bring the customer experience to every employee?
Portuguese translation by Tamiris M. Manzano.
Translator’s notes (Portuguese version):
1 – Netflix is an American company offering an online streaming service for movies and series over the internet.
2 – Amazon.com is an e-commerce organization from the United States.
