Customer-Compelled: Overall

On the other hand, to escape the more obvious pitfalls of Internally-Driven thinking, many try the seemingly logical alternative: commit to everything customers request. The soothing advice: 'Be close, listen to customers, promise total satisfaction, do as they say, meet - nay exceed - their expectations; then you must surely succeed.'

But this is no antidote for Internally-Driven - it cures one illness with another. Despite listening enthusiastically, the "Customer-Compelled" culture still usually fails to discover or deeply understand the specific experiences that customers would potentially most value, while encouraging fatally indecisive efforts to be all things to all people.

Overall, to what extent does this description accurately fit the business you are reviewing?

1	3	3	4	5
Not At All	To Minor Extent	To Some Extent	To Large Extent	To Very Great Extent	Don't Know

Below are five descriptions of more specific "Customer-Compelled" business cultures. Consider to what extent each depicts the business you are reviewing

In this mentality the 'customer-facing' functions promise customers a lot: promises of "total (or guaranteed) customer satisfaction," "customer partnerships," "delight the customer," or "customer first," abound. Yet, little attention has been given to identifying and prioritizing the specific resulting experiences that should be delivered, and what should not be delivered, to fulfill these vague commitments at all, let alone profitably. No real decisions or highly actionable, measurable commitments have been made. As a result, while feeling very 'customer oriented,' the organization falls back on Internally-Driven criteria to make real decisions.

Here, the customer-facing functions listen assiduously to customers, asking what actions and features are desired, then pass on these suggestions and requests to the operational functions. This approach elicits customer opinions about what we should do in our internal functions, without helping us understand the more important question - what resulting experiences those customer would potentially most value. While imagining that we are 'listening to the voice of the customer,' the operational functions, faced with an unfocused collection of suggestions, usually screen most of these out, and focus mostly on those which conform to Internally-Driven criteria.

Here, "the customer" is important ('king,' even), but rarely includes the actual users most crucial to our success. We concentrate mostly on the immediate customer entities, e.g. distribution channels and other intermediary entities, rarely making a sustained serious effort to establish dialogue and insightful understanding at the end-user part of our chain. This short-coming reflects a belief that actual users are too complex, unwieldy and numerous to understand, and can far better be understood by the immediate entity than by us. We then are perplexed to find that we seem able to compete only on a basis of price.

Here, when we do interact with end-user entities, we stay mesmerized by the buying function (sometimes 'Procurement,' sometimes 'Worldwide Supply Chain Management'). This reflects the unchallenged power of the gate keepers, and again a belief that actual users inside the end-user entity are too difficult to understand, and can best be interpreted by the buying function not us. We then are surprised to receive our invitation to the reverse auction, where we really learn the meaning of competitive price.

In this somewhat extreme, if well-intentioned, version of the Customer-Compelled organization, all functions, not just Sales/Marketing, are urged to ask customers what they want, then to try to give it to them. This process is not bounded by any choice of customers to target, or what specific resulting experiences to deliver to them (let alone what not to deliver to them). Thus, the organization is encouraged to give anything requested to any and all customers, resulting in unfocused chaos much more than profitable value delivery.