[MUSIC] One of the core themes of this MOOC is that we are increasingly differentiated, not based on functional benefits, but based on the customer experience. And it's that customer journey that is the spine, if you will, for brand differentiation. Now, if you think about that customer journey, it cuts across all our business functions, many, many touch points. And we refer to them as moments that matter in module two. And if you think about the organizational complexity that stands behind it, there's often discrete functions, which exist in what we term organizational silos that serve those different touch points. As organizations got bigger and bigger, to reduce complexity, they adopted this command and control structure which resulted in this very siloed or silo riven approach to the market place. Now, a lot of research has been done and books have been written on the customer experience, but it's really about designing the experience. There's far less on how to do we gear up as an organization that sits behind that customer journey to provide a consistent experience. Now in previous MOOCs, you know our coat hanger over here. We've talked about this coat hanger and in this MOOC I referred to it with London Business School where had these coat hangers in one of our bedrooms. This coat hanger was also present in one of the organizations that I did some work with. And that was in the financial sector, in the middle of the financial crisis. And as you may well know, financial companies really lost trust of their customers. And it was all about rebuilding trust with the customers, and that was about, why do we have to build trust? Because the financial model, the business side, if you think of the 3Bs is about cross selling. That's a revenue generator. So the brand that sits in front of this business model has to be about trust and expertise, and we listen. And those are really the brand values that they espoused. Now, the customer experience as you might think has a touch point that's the call center. Now think about the KPIs that call center had. The KPI was the number of calls handled per hour. So while the brand is all about, we listen, the KPI is about getting rid of the customer as quickly as possible. So very, very siloed in their approach. They have their own discrete KPIs, not thinking about what it does to the management of the brand. They were thinking about the cost of the call center, and as you know, many call centers are outsourced. Now, this coat hanger, fun enough, was also present in their very own executive training center with their own executive state. And I thought it was rather humorous because if you think about it, they want to gain the trust of their customers, but they don't even trust their own employees in terms of whether they will steal the coat hangers or not. So there's real misalignment around the organization. Now, you can think of this misalignment in terms of functional silos, but you can also think about the geographic footprint of our organization as different geographic silos. So think about running a hotel which is present in many locations. The same customer might visit those different hotel units but different managers are managing these. And what they're often doing is they're optimizing profits locally. So think about checking into a hotel. I think many of you will have been irritated by this because it's one of the leading complaints people have about hotels. Think about the Wi-Fi charges. Some of the most celebrated hotels, leading hotels will still charge their customers Wi-Fi access fees, often at exorbitant rates. You're paying hundreds to stay in this room, yet you have to pay extra for Wi-Fi. Why? Because this allows the local company or the local hotel to maximize revenues. And of course, customer expectations have risen over time because Starbucks, for example, got rid of these Wi-Fi charges as early as 2008. So we need to manage the brand, if you will, across these different geographic silos in order to give a consistent costumer experience. Now, this is well known in B2B and they're often at the forefront of managing that. And for their best clients, the crown jewels, if you will, in terms of revenue, they might have created a key account management structure. Why? Because if you have a big customer in one geography, you don't want to treat them like a small and insignificant customer in a different geography. They expect the same service from you worldwide. So you have to invest in the corporate structure that sits behind it. Now, the one example I wanted to share for this MOOC is based on this book here. It's one of the books I recommend for the MOOC. It's called Employees First, Customer Second, and it's written by Vineet Nayar who is the CEO of HCL Technologies, and Indian IT specialist. If you want to know more about it, you should read this book, but let me give you a couple of the highlights that we have. The real turning point for HCL Technologies was this changing environment that we already discussed before. You've got in the past technological differentiation. What do we mean by that in this sector? Well, we have certain programming expertise, we have certain products, and that allowed us to go to market and basically sell boxes, if you will. They're digital boxes but they are boxes at the end of the day. Now, competition changed. Basically, there's a level playing field, if you will, on the functional benefits. And the real name of the game was about execution. It was about really transforming the organizations you worked with that was implementing these solutions. And it was integrating different boxes, if you will, into one overall solution. So HCL was growing at the time, but they weren't growing quite as fast as the sector as a whole. So this is a problem for them. And for this company, and as the book describes, the turning point was really about thinking about that command and control structure that we have, which results in all these different silos, to really thinking about that at the bottom of all those split silos, the customer value zone. Where is value created? Well, it's with the customer. And what they basically did, visually, they turned this pyramid upside down. They put that value zone, the customer interface, with the frontline employees at the top. And they thought of enabling functions in the organizations as supporting the frontline. It was all about enabling, engaging and empowering frontline employees. And the CEO really led this organization in this changed process. This was his primary focus, and he had to lead through his own behaviors. Let me highlight a couple of aspects if you think about systems, processes, approaches to getting this done. One was, and this is a simple one, you might think of your annual feedback where your line manager provides the feedback. Now, that's sometimes a cozy relationship, sometimes not, but it's a pretty one on one relationship. We once in a while think of 360 degree feedback. But for this organization, 360 degree feedback became really essential for thinking about the collaboration across these functional silos. They had to understand how well are we collaborating with all these different touch points at the customer, because they're all involved in providing a solution. Now from another similar company, Juniper Networks, just to give an example of how many people touch points we have. It was claimed at one point that one large global account had 344 different people from Juniper working on that account in one way or another during the year. They thought this was an extraordinary number. They investigate it, and what they actually found out it was actually 920 different people working on that one account. So you can imagine if you have them in silos and they're all doing something slightly different, you're not really going to add up to one consistent solution. So how do these things change? Well, we talked about the 360 feedback, all these different people you work with, they get to comment on your behavior. They also have this portal called, You and I, which is really about anybody in the organization can give feedback, ask questions, challenge top management who's there to support and empower the frontline. This became an open communication channel across the organization. They also had different ways of creating and innovating value, if you will. So instead of thinking of the few creative minds who can create innovations, it was all about thinking about the customer, what do the actually need in terms of solutions. Engaging the frontline who then had to create a business case with the customer onboard and sell it into the company. So it's not that top down innovation approach pushing it into the market place, it really thought of that customer experience, that transformation, having a project that a customer's already signed up for, and getting the okay from management. So literally, everything in this organization changed. It was a multi-year project, it was very successful, resulting in a complete shift In their product portfolio. From discreet box selling to some very, very large IT project that became their corporate KPIs. If you want to be a transformative company, selling solutions, the projects tend to be larger. It resulted in an increase in employees satisfaction and this company basically doubled their employee base in the last ten years. They now have 100,000 plus employees. And it's maybe a story you'd like to take a look at. [MUSIC]
