How well does your business understand customers?
“There’s nothing you can tell me about my customers I don’t know already” is a refrain I hear a lot from entrepreneurs. As many of them have built up their business customer by customer, it’s hard to convince them otherwise. But as their businesses grow, so they need to delegate responsibility to others. And that’s where the problems start.
You see, it’s not about whether one person knows the customer or not; its whether everyone, collectively, knows their role in serving them and how they fit together. If they don’t all have a clear idea as to what value they are adding, the customer’s experience is harder to manage. And consistency is a major challenge for growing businesses, hindering growth and making the it harder for the team as well.
Growing a business requires teams to work cohesively, with clarity and focus. And the most valuable way to break down silos and get people working together effectively is to help them collectively understand what value customers seek and their individual role. Leaving it up to them to work it out or second guess their leader is not a viable strategy; exposing all parts of the business to the customer’s perspective and working through how each will contribute is a rapid way to build human systems that add value and improve everyone’s experience of the business. Now that is worth knowing.