Is Your Company As Customer-Focused As You Think?

Read the article at the Sloan Management Review web siteMIT's Sloan Journal of Management recently published a provocative article that provides a nice litmus test for customer focus.  Authors Patrick Barwise and Seán Meehan pose five questions to ask yourself:

1. Can middle managers accurately describe your customer promise?
2. Can all members of your senior executive team name the three things that most undermine trust among your existing customers?
3. Is your brand really the best option for customers? Will it continue to be next month and next year?
4. Have you embraced any novel ideas that have produced significant innovations beyond the familiar during the past year?
5. Have front-line staff posed any uncomfortable questions or suggested any important improvements to your offering during the last three months?

While there are many other questions you could imagine asking to test the degree to which your organization is customer focused, this is a darned good starting point.  Importantly, they focus on middle managers and front line staff.  Moreover, they focus on what undermines trust, the hardest thing to earn and sustain from your customers.

What's missing?  At Bain, we always start by testing whether an organization can clearly identify its target customers, what they need/want, and what our company is uniquely positioned to deliver to them.  It's an important omission from this list, but I still liked the article.

Read the full text of the article:  Is Your Company As Customer-Focused As You Think? 

(Thanks to Richard Owen for pointing this article out in his own blog.)