THREE PILLARS

OF A CUSTOMER
OBSESSION
CULTURE
Written by Gerry McGovern
Simplicity
Humility
Agility Humility, agility and simplicity are the three
pillars of a customer obsessed culture. It is
culture first if you want to reap the rewards
from customer obsession. It is a mindset, a
way of thinking and behaving.
Humility is not a sign of weakness. In a
world of staggering complexity, humility
is the ability to listen and learn. Agility
is measured based on your ability to
respond to customer feedback. Simplicity
is about taking on complexity to simplify
the experience of your customers.

02
SKEPTICAL, EMPOWERED CUSTOMERS

03
CUSTOMERS HAVE CHANGED.
MOST ORGANISATIONS HAVE NOT.
Today, customers are much less trusting of brands,
politicians or institutions. The 2019 Edelman Trust
survey found that globally only 59% trust brands’
marketing communications to be accurate and
truthful. More worryingly, almost 75% of consumers
also reported that they try to avoid advertising
altogether.

Does trust matter? Well, when trust declines

below a certain level, societal instability can be
a consequence. In the UK, studies show that only
20% of British people trust politicians, while public
favorability towards advertising hit a record low
of 25% in December 2018, according to Credos, the
Advertising Association’s think tank. In the 1960s, Only 59% trust brands’ marketing
favorability was over 80%. communications to be accurate and truthful

04
Low trust societies are highly skeptical ones. People get jaded from hearing
tired marketing mantras like “your call is important to us”. They’re tired
about hearing brands talk about simplicity and how much brands care. They
are tired of brand loyalty because they find, time and time again, that the
loyal customers get ripped off, while the new customers get all the attention
and special offers. This is not an age to talk about what you’re going to do.
Customers judge you by what you actually do, what their real experience is
like. Often, the strongest, most memorable experience a customer has is when
they have a problem and need support. This is when customers truly find out
how much the brand actually cares about them.

If there is one area where trust is rising it is social trust. People want to
hear from other people who have used the product. They want to know
what the product is really like. Is it genuinely easy to use, or is that just
more marketing hype? Trust, in many ways, has shifted to use. So, in this
new trust landscape, who do people trust most? Current customers. It is
current customers who are the new marketers. In an age of declining trust
in marketing and advertising, it is current customers who are increasingly
the voice of your brand.

05
Humility

06
In 1900, the average scientific paper
had a single author. By 2020, it had
more than five. In fact, since the invent
of the web there has been an explosion
in collaborative authorship, with some
scientific papers having thousands of
authors.

The deepening complexity of science,

combined with the availability of the
greatest global network ever invented
(the Internet) has led to a massive increase
in collaboration. Complex problems are
better solved by many minds working
well together. This challenges the
classical hierarchical, command-and-
control, manager model of traditional
organisations. The manager often doesn’t
know what to do but they must pretend
that they do know, and this leads to even
worse decisions.

07
Humility is about recognising that we do not have
nearly all the answers. It is about a constant
process of listening and learning. In the modern,
collaborative organisation, the number one member
of the team is the current customer. Microsoft has
been a company that was initially quite challenged
by the new collaborative economy. Theirs was
culture fed on internal competition and rivalries.
In order to embrace a new collaborative culture,
they changed the way they rewarded people.
It used to be that 100% of the reward in individual
performance reviews went to how much you had
created. That dropped to 33%. Now, 33% is allocated
to how much you have shared of what you have
created, and another 33% is for how much you have
used of what others have created.
If we incentivise individual competition, we get
competitive individuals. If we incentivise
collaboration, we get great collaboration and a
more humble mindset that wants to share and reuse.
08
HERE IS AN EXAMPLE
Buurtzorg, a Dutch home-care nursing organisation, has
practically no managers. In just 10 years, it has grown
from 4 employees to 14,000. It has the highest patient
satisfaction in the Netherlands, along with the highest
employee satisfaction. Its cost base is 67% lower than
its competitors even though it charges more per hour.
Why? Because it cures its patients faster. Nurses’ work
is not measured by what they do but by how they help
their patients live independently. These metrics are
radical because they measure use, not production. They
measure outcomes, not inputs. Buurtzorg believes in
radical decentralisation and active collaboration. There
are no more than 15 people in any one multidisciplinary
team. The technology is used to bring these teams
together, share best practices, compare notes and help It has but one golden rule: each
solve problems. Buurtzorg is humble. It puts the patient Buurtzorg nurse must spend at least
at the very center. 60% of their time with their patients.

09
Humility is about designing with customers, not for
customers. It’s about the ability to let go of your
precious ideas if the environment of use is showing
you that better ones exist. Back around 2007,
there was an ecommerce app called Tote. It wasn’t
getting a lot of use. The founders went out among
the few thousand users and watched them use it,
listened to them intently. They noticed that there
was use feature that was really liked. So, they
got rid of Tote and turned that one feature into
Pinterest. Glitch was a multiplayer game that just
wasn’t that popular. The founders did like the tool
they had created in order to help them develop the
game. So, they let their game go and turned the tool
into Slack. Snowdevil was a small snowboarding
site. It was doing ok, but the founders noticed that
the ecommerce engine was pretty cool, so they
turned that into Shopify. What the founders of
Slack, Pinterest and Shopify have in common is an
obsession with their customers. Slack and Shopify, in
particular, prioritise customer support. Tobias Lütke,
the founder of Shopify, still spends hours every day
doing customer support. Listening, learning.
You need to be humble to do that, strong and humble.
10
11
Organisational agility is measured based on the
speed at which you can respond to your customers.
The ability to digest and act on feedback is
what is separating the winners and losers today.
Historically, whenever there was a significant
change in communication technology, there was a
significant change in the economy and society.
The printing press heralded a revolution in
many areas. One of them was in speeding up the
advancement of knowledge. In 1570, Abraham
Ortelius printed the first Theatrum, a collaborative
map of the world involving many cartographers. For
the first time, it was possible to create exact copies
very quickly at a reasonable price. Ortelius realised
that this allowed him to do something that was
much more difficult before print: getting feedback.
He actively encouraged feedback and feedback he
got. By 1598, as a result of the tremendous feedback
Ortelius received, there had been at least 28 new
editions of the Theatrum. Mapping progressed more
in those 28 years than it had in the previous 500.
12

Google Maps changes 28 times an hour. It
actively encourages feedback but more
importantly it acts on the feedback. If,
for example, you report that they missed
a roundabout in a particular area, they
will verify your information against other
sources. If it is proved accurate, then that
roundabout can be added to the map within
20 minutes of you delivering that feedback.
Some years ago, Google came up with the bright
idea of letting you know how many calories you
were likely to burn by walking to your destination.
The image they used to illustrate their new feature
was a cupcake. Immediately, they stated getting
negative feedback. People complained that they
couldn’t turn it off, that it felt shamey, that a
cupcake had both gender and cultural implications.
It took them one hour to document the flaws. It took
them three hours to remove the feature. Three hours!
Even if most organisations got such feedback they
would simply not have the capacity to act on it so
quickly. It would probably take them six months to
take a mal-performing feature down.
The winners are nimble and agile. Amazon makes
changes to its websites every twelve seconds.
Apple can review up to 50 different versions of
a single hardware button, constantly iterating,
constantly refining based on feedback.
13
SIMPLICITY

14
For the last 50 years, there has been a very popular talk show in
Ireland called The Late Late Show. I remember a particular episode
from the Eighties. They had about 20 cartons of milk on a table and
they offered a big prize for the first audience member who could open
a carton without spilling it. Not a single person could do it. Many
of them apologized for their inability to do such a seemingly simple
task. This carton was somewhat infamous in Ireland. Nobody seems
to be able to open it without spilling the milk. I found it very strange.
Why would a company do that, I wondered?

Years later I was working with the very company that made the
cartons. I met with an engineer and asked him the question I had
been wanting to ask all those years. “Operational efficiency,” was
his simple reply. The company had an objective to get the maximum
number of cartons possible on a pallet for distribution. The company
had now got rid of that hard-to-open carton. Now they had a much
simpler screw-cap. This was surely not meeting the old operational
efficiency objectives. What had changed, I enquired? “The customer,”
was the engineers reply. “If the carton was hard to open they used
to think it was their fault. Now they think it’s our fault.”

15
The customer has changed. Most organisations have
not. Simplicity is no longer something that’s nice to talk
about in a marketing campaign. If you have to say you’re
simple, you’re not, because if you were genuinely simple,
you wouldn’t have to say anything. Your simplicity would
speak for itself through use. Becoming truly simple will
inevitably have some upfront costs. Complexity is an
inherent part of a modern economies. The question is:
who takes on the complexity? If you force complexity
onto your customers then they will revolt, and given the
opportunity, they will leave. Taking on the complexity will
have costs. You may have to forsake some operational
efficiency in order to achieve a simpler environment that
works for your customers. Is it worth the effort?

Well, if you want loyal customers who stay with you

longer, spend more with you, and tell others about
the positive experience they’d had with you, then
simplicity is worth the effort.

16
THE CUSTOMER
IS A DICTATOR
We need to become customer obsessed because customers
are now obsessed with themselves. Customers have changed
but most organizations have now. Customers have become
more skeptical and demanding. They trust people like them
who have used the product or service much more than
they trust branding or advertising. The path to customer
obsession is through your current customers because if you
keep them happy, they are your ultimate marketers, and if
you make them mad they tell lots of potential customers
about you. It used to be that the customer was king. Today,
the customer is dictator.

17
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