Customer Centricity - The Forward Pass
Eduardo Nofuentes
I have played basketball most of my life. One of the plays that I have always enjoyed is the fastbreak; specially when I make the last forward pass to one of my team-mates who is running towards the ring ahead of any opponents and he finishes with an easy layup. I have always enjoyed that feeling of seeing the ball fly off my hands; not on the direction of my teammate, but on the direction my teammate is going to be in the exact time it takes for the ball to travel through the court.
Since I was a kid, my coaches told me not to pass the ball to where my teammate was; but where he was going to be. It makes sense, if your teammate is running to the ring, you don’t want to pass the ball where he is now, but where he is going to be to allow his momentum and inertia make the most of the play. To achieve this sporting physics achievement, you need a combination of practice, technique and intuition.
Well, in many ways, this is how I see today, outside of the court, customer centricity and strategy. The combination of practice (experience), technique and intuition of meeting your customer not where they are now; but where they are going to be in the short future.
Many organisations spend a lot of time and money trying to understand their current customers and products today; and that is ok. We call that customer focus. We try to understand how satisfied they are with our current offering and what are the things they value the most and least about dealing with us. What customer centric organisations do, in addition to that, is to “predict” what those customers (or new ones) are going to want in the short future. What are the products they are going to use that they don’t even know they need right now.
I am sure we all have in mind famous customer centric organisations that do this very well. Apple, Amazon, Google, Tesla, airbnb’s, etc... Organisations that have changed the way we live and that have put things in our lives that we didn’t know we needed. But even organisations like that don’t get the “forward pass” right all the time. Sometimes they have put products out there that have failed. Amazon’s biggest flop was the “Fire phone”, a smartphone that could never compete with the iPhone, and made a loss of $170M for the retailer. But Apple has failed too; and an example of that is their maps product Apple Maps; even Tim Cook (Apple’s CEO) had to apologise and said Google’s was much better.
I could continue with plenty of examples; but the point I am trying to make is that those organisations are happy to live with those failures because they understand them as part of the process. When you are trying to “predict”, it is natural to get some predictions wrong. But how many have they got right? Is it safer then to always pass the ball to where your teammate is? or is it better to take some risks and try to pass to where you think they will be?
At Neu21 we think about customer centricity under those lenses and with the combination of those three elements: practice, technique and intuition. Practice is our equivalent of experience; we all have lived through enough cycles to understand what our customers may need or not in the future. Technique are the customer centricity tools we use to scan the market and collect data to try to “predict” with as much certainty as possible; and intuition, my favourite, well...it is just that. Intuition.
This financial year that is ending in Australia has seen us again yield some good results because of this. When I was looking at the Neu21 numbers for the year, I realised that nearly 25% of the revenue this year has come from products that we didn’t offer to our customers last financial year and that we decided to launch in July.
Strategy, luck or intuition?
I think it was a well-executed forward pass
We’re hosting an Online Event about building a Customer-Centric culture on 4 July 2024 at 8am. Book you FREE place here: