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26 | 21sT - 27Th NovEmbEr 2014 | UTILITY WEEK Customers Market view A colleague and I were discussing the different natures of customers. You may be familiar with some of the profiling tools oen used in personal devel- opment: Myers-Briggs; Disc (dominance, compliance, submission, inducement); or perhaps Insights (yellow, red, green and blue). We use a tool called Tetramap (earth, air, water, fire) to help organisations better understand and respond to customers. During our conversation, it was suggested that BMW deliberately targets customers with an 'earth' preference: bold, decisive, goal focused. And that made me think. One of our biggest challenges in focus- ing an organisation on the 'right' changes to improve customer satisfaction is getting the board to genuinely see things from their customers' perspective. We term this "getting the customer in the boardroom". Board members tend to be strong char- acters with clear and sometimes forceful opinions. Getting the board to look at their organisation from an outside-in perspective is relatively easy. Getting the board to step into a custom- ers' shoes can be a little trickier. The direc- tors we work with can reasonably easily step into the shoes of a customer who is like them, that is, similar in characteristics, behaviours, responses, emotional reactions, attitude and values. What they are doing is getting into a customer's situation but see- ing that situation through their own natural lens. Take a real life example. A young profes- sional, with a high earth preference, gets made unexpectedly redundant along with a small group of colleagues. While shocked and upset, she negotiates to keep the com- pany car longer, internalises the emotion and drives directly to an employment agency where she signs up for temporary work and is given a contract to start the following Mon- day. Bold, decisive, goal focused. Another member of the group, equally capable but with a high water preference, put in the same situation also experiences shock and upset but its impact and her reactions are quite different. She immedi- ately telephones a friend in tears to get a li home and someone to talk it though with. She needs a period of reflection before she is ready to move on. She spends that time contacting colleagues to check they are cop- ing and identifying the right permanent role, which she begins the following month. Emo- tional, considered, empathetic. Neither response is right or wrong, its just different. The response was different because their natural characteristics, behaviours, responses, emotional needs, attitude, values and so on were different. Our high earth character is likely to find our high water character's response difficult to understand because it is fundamentally different to their own. Equally, our high water character may find it very difficult to relate to our high earth character's reaction. The same applies to our board members. They find it considerably harder to get into the mindset of a customer who is naturally very different from them. I lose count of the number of times we have presented a statis- tically robust piece of customer insight to a board and got the response from at least one director "but as a customer, that's not what I'd want". At best, that director might repre- sent a quarter of the perspectives considered in the research, but if they are not balanced in the room with equal advocacy for the views of all types of customers, they dismiss critical elements of the customer insight because they cannot see the relevance. This can be very dangerous, and causes a problem for the customer experience. We have to get directors to relate to all four customer perspectives so that their deci- sions and choices are based on more than just their own personal preferences. If not, the organisation will inevitably design and deliver a customer experience that appeals to a certain type of customer, those people rep- resented on the board. This got me thinking more. Can we already see the characteristics of dominant business leaders being reflected in the style of customer experience their organisations deliver? Maybe. I thought about Michael O'Leary at Ryanair and how he has publicly admitted that his personal character drove a culture within Ryanair that resulted in poor customer experience. His recent profits announcement and associated comments show that he has personally connected with what customers want and this is increasingly reflected in the Ryanair customer experience. Moreover, he says the customer focus is now directly driving profit. What about the late Anita Roddick of Bod- yshop – her ethics and values are personified in the customer experience Bodyshop deliv- ers even today. Or the creative, differentiated, 'special' Virgin customer experience, which certainly has its roots in Sir Richard Bran- son's personal characteristics. Apple, with its visionary approach not just to product but to customer experience in store with tradition- bucking approaches like 'the checkout that comes to you', this was invigorated by both the terms of office of the late Steve Jobs. These examples of well-known business people are deliberately extreme illustrations of how leaders cultivate customer experi- ences that appeal to customers like them. We know, through our experience, that for most organisations, the link between leadership character and customer experience is strong. Many organisations cannot afford to appeal to just one type of customer. They have to appeal more broadly to customers of all types. Significant advantage can be gained by developing directors' understand- ing of the customer perspectives that come less naturally to them. There are tools and techniques that can achieve this. To begin with, it needs to be very conscious and deliberate. Increasing awareness and mak- ing good use of all the natural preferences in the boardroom as well as introducing simple, practical steps that ensure adequate focus on preferences that are not strongly represented, will bring about more broadly appealing customer experiences. Over time, years, it becomes more intuitive and less conscious. It's time to let all the customers into your boardroom. Nicola Eaton Sawford, managing director, Customer Whisperers Customers in the boardroom It is all too easy to fashion a customer experience based on your own reflection when you need to embrace all types of customer. Nicola Eaton describes how it should be done.