Outside-In is a business imperative

September 21, 2011

What are the challenges of succeeding in business in the 21stcentury? Ask leading companies and you would come up with the same list: 

  • Competition is fierce and global. 

  • Customers have become rebellious.

  • Customers are promiscuous

  • Customers have expectations like never before. 

  • Customers demand choice, comprehensive information and the best price.   

  • Customer know more about your service and product than you do (the prosumer)

Former IBM boss Lou Gerstner called this “commodity hell” and that is pretty much the nightmare for every business. With a list like this many businesses would claim to be already embracing the challenge and becoming customer centric with ‘voice of the customer’ initiatives. This is simply a collective delusion and is the root cause of why so many are failing the customer, the shareholder and their hardworking employees. 

The delusion is easy to understand. Businesses have created departments that claim customer focus and extensively poll customer wants, seek feedback and then try to act on the information. 

While this creates an illusion of progress it is to a large part a futile exercise focused on fundamental misunderstanding of 21st century customers. 

Asking internal questions based on customer data results in such questions as “how do we improve service?”, “how can we reduce non value added work?”, and “how can we standardise?”. This thinking stems from a time when the world turned more slowly and is more appropriate to the 1950’s then this centuries new business reality. To orientate to long term business and customer success we need to look at the enterprise from the Outside-In (OI) rather than inside-out. It is now about understanding customer needs (not wants) and eradicating all the things that do not contribute to achieving Successful Customer Outcomes (SCO’s). 

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