Customer Focus Competency Recipe Cards In Action

This will be a shorter post as it’s been a crazy week. (Aren’t they all?) First things first: I hope you’ve been checking out my podcast. We’re up through seven episodes with a few others coming the next few Tuesdays. So far, I’ve interviewed CCO leaders at St. Jude (Martin Hand), Liberty Mutual (Margie Dillon), Northern Trust (Scott Dille), the Smithsonian (Samir Bitar), Audi (Mark Ramsay), the Columbus (OH) Metro Library system (Alison Circle), and Premara Blue Cross (Curtis Kopf). You can find all the episodes at that link above. It’s called The Human Duct Tape Show because CCO work often is akin to being a form of human duct tape — and if you want really actionable insights and plans in terms of how people broke down silos and stitched together cross-functionality in the name of the customer in huge companies, those episodes all have some great examples. New ones come out every Tuesday.

What are the customer focus competency recipe cards and what are they based on?

Today, I wanted to quickly talk about customer focus competency recipe cards, which are available on this site. I get asked often what they are or what that means, so I thought a quick post clarifying customer focus competency would be in order.

First: the customer focus competency recipe cards are based off the five customer experience competencies, which I’ve developed over 30 years of doing this type of work. (You can learn even more about the competencies here.) They are:

• Customers as assets
• Align around experience
• Build a customer listening path
• Proactive experience reliability and innovation
• One-company accountability, leadership, and culture

Again, there are great, real-life examples of all five being done around the world on my podcast — so I encourage you to check it out.

All five competencies in the framework are crucial, but all five are hard to accomplish. CCO work can often feel very isolating, especially if you’re undertaking it at a big, entrenched company that’s always operated according to silos and surveys and functional knowledge areas, etc. As they say, it’s hard to turn around oil tankers.

What is the advantage of using the customer focus competency recipe cards?

This brings up to the customer focus competency recipe cards. To do this work successfully, you need a place to begin. These customer focus competency recipe cards are quick, explicit actions you can take to begin improving your customer experience immediately.

For example, let’s talk about customers as assets. If you download the customer focus competency recipe cards at that link above, you’ll find six recipes to help you immediately get rolling on treating customers as fundamental strategic assets. Recipe 3, as part of the “Give Permission” aspect of customers as assets, is the “Kill A Stupid Rule” movement. This allows employees to identify rules that erode customer trust and diminish employees’ ability to drive value — and, once ID’ed, kill them. Fun, yea?

In short, then, the customer focus competency recipe cards are kind of a cheat sheet to the beginnings of this work — and that’s why I mentioned the podcast above too. Listen to even a fraction of the seven episodes published so far and you’ll get a wealth of other actionable items you can begin implementing in your organization today.

Onward and upward — and as always, if you have any questions about this work, don’t hesitate to get in touch, download the recipe cards, leave a comment, find me on LinkedIn, or whatever else. I love to help people grow and learn in CCO and customer-facing, silo-uniting roles.