Anticipate: Knowing What Customers Need Before They Do

Chapter 10

Leveraging Your Culture and Value Chain

• Leverage your existing customer and employee loyalty
• Increase your teaming and elevate it to partnering
• Extend Level III practices to the broader value chain

To recap and connect our various discussions thus far, Level I customer focus (A) revolved around voice of the customer (VOC) activities and sought to measure, track, and improve the supplier’s ability to identify, or detect, and meet the customer’s unmet needs at the point of transaction. Level II customer focus (B) concentrated on teaming with the customer in ways that further differentiated the supplier’s ability to deliver value, developed a more complete view of customer value and unstated needs, and created barriers to entry at multiple touch points across the entire customer’s experience. (See Figure 10.1.)

Figure 10.1 Customer Focus Maturity Model®

Level III is all about building and leveraging a customer-centric culture (C); building a culture that is characterized by an ask, act, and align mindset in every aspect of the supplier’s business. It involves sustaining that culture with a system of internal management practices that support and drive the customer focus, and are aligned with each other. Finally, Level III is about leveraging that culture to continually improve the supplier organization’s internal effectiveness, extending the loyalty of the supplier’s ...