Anthony Giddens, Thomas Friedman, Swedish authors Kjell and Nordstrom and many others stressed out the fact that we have entered the information age, a long time ago. This change in age requires a change in the way we do business, as it happened when the change that lead our ancestors to the Industrial age. Of course, this change isn’t supposed to be immediate. But the fact is that we’re already more than a decade since the it first began and many businesses still have a hard time understanding that they need to focus on their Customers above all. The main reason for this is how business people are educated and how the current models are designed.

When studying business, marketing, finance or an MBA we’re always taught that our main focus should be either on the shareholders or stakeholders. The way this is taught is in the form of a debate between the shareholder centric model and the stakeholder centric model. We’re not taught that there is another option and we won’t automatically think there should be another approach. The new approach is Customer Centric Business which says that a business should focus first in pleasing their customers. The article published in Harvard Business Review states that customer centric organizations perform better than organizations focusing directly on improving the shareholders or stakeholders well being. The relationship seems simple enough: If you please your customers they will buy more and you earn more money. 

The education problem is not just for business people, but it has extended itself to the business literature and magazines so anyone with an interest in business will end up thinking that this two theories are the way to go. The problem is that the data shows another thing. The data in fact shows that as companies shifted the focus between shareholders and stakeholders the overall performance went down. 

The main problem is that companies can’t understand how to leverage social networks for their business as long as they’re stuck with the industrial age model and values. To leverage social networks a shift in culture is needed and it’s a change that requires more than just education or a specific strategy for social media. The main reason why this isn’t happening yet is that the models are still stuck with business leaders while customers expectations haven’t changed radically to make businesses realize a change is needed. Change is starting to get into businesses slowly and many still have to embrace the fact that things aren’t going to be done as they used to be. Of course, there’s always the early adopters who are probably the ones that will have the best time embracing this new business landscape.

To make this changes fast and to leverage the advantage of embracing the new landscape businesses need to make a strategic shift in the way they do business. This shift should include the attached organizational design reform and even the design of the offices and shops. This approach isn’t that new, but it has yet to be embraced by more big businesses. In The Whuffie Factor, Tara Hunt proposes some key points for businesses to change and use the power of social networks to build and grow a business. The points Tara proposes are not about a communications strategy, but have to do with the heart of the business itself. If you think about it, marketing or PR can’t make a business be loved and generate a community if the whole business isn’t aligned with the goal of thrilling customers with every experience. 

This is why I think a Customer Centric Business model needs to be pursued by businesses as a response to the information age. The reasons are simple, as information flows easily around the world people will filter the information they receive. Before it was impossible to communicate easily with so much interesting people and we had limited choices : radio stations, tv channels and news papers. Now that the information flows around we are able to decide what and to whom we would listen. Now we can stop listening to the mainstream media and we’re more in touch with lots of people that share their experiences about products, services and almost everything that happens on their life. In fact the internet made us social as much as we made the internet social. What I mean with this is that the amount of information available grew so much we turned into our trusted networks and if we didn’t had a particular network well built we started building one using the ground rules of socialization. 

People will share two kinds of experiences. Outstanding original experience, like Zappos, or horrible experiences, like flying in United or Delta. That’s the first ingredient, the second is the Social Web where people will publish more and more of their experience, specially when they’re utterly happy or frustrated. So without a customer centric business model we will be providing some bad experiences to our customers and not even all the brains in PR or Marketing will be able to fight the amount of negative comments that will generate on-line and off-line.  A customer centric business will exist to be sure their customers are thrilled with every experience with them and will make an outstanding effort to match the customers needs when necessary, they will also be honest when there’s a better option for the customer than the one they provide.

The Customer Centric Model should be adopted internally and made part of the culture. So this new approach is far from happening in the marketing or PR silos and it’s rather an strategic process that needs to start somewhere in the organization and supported by the upper management. The first step in this process is to create a solid and positive company culture that will assure that everyone is aligned and ready to help customers. The following steps will come as a result of the new culture though they need to be guided and planned to be consistent with the culture.

So the second step is to redefine the companies goals to make them aim for customer satisfaction at all times. Currently, the slogans seem to guide the customer centric strategy and all the processes and goals seem to be pointing to the opposite direction. If a process it’s thought to achieve cost efficiency, the main focus should be customer service still. It sounds illogical and maybe even crazy, but we need to get creative on how to cut spending while still maintaining the focus on the customer.

The next step is to make sure the process design is consistent with the goals and culture. Here’s where many companies get it wrong. We usually expect the organizational design to be easy and it’s not and sometimes unplanned growth can lead to frustration and loss of focus in the main goal. For example, if your company is based on customer service you’ll need to put the customer service department at a core leading position, with a board seat and all. If you don’t do that and follow the ‘usual’ solution of setting customer service in Marketing this may lose the focus against other Marketing goals. Another problem is that sometimes processes are designed with efficiency in mind rather than the goals and culture in mind. A process could be a crappy experience for the customer because the efficient FAQ page was designed over the call center, even if the call center is what delivers the great experience the culture talks about. 

The final step is to evaluate and develop new solutions as problems show up. There’s no perfect process and customer expectations change quickly so the organization needs to get in a quick innovation process to be closer to their customers and providing thrilling experiences every day. The guide for this solutions should be the culture as written in the values and mission of the company. 

Embracing the customer centric approach to business will give companies the opportunity to thrive. This change isn’t easy, but many newly created companies are already embracing it, so if your business needs to survive it will have to be done. In the end having happy customers will make the value of your business in the long term go up.