How to Become a Customer-Centric Business – and Why It Matters

Kathy (host):
Well, hello there and welcome back to another episode of Help! My Business is Growing, a Podcast where we explore how to grow and build a business that is healthy and sustainable. I’m your host, Kathy Svetina, a fractional CFO and founder of NewCastle Finance, a company where we believe that everything you do in your business will eventually end up in your finances. To get to healthy finances is, of course, to have a healthy business. The question is, how do you get there? Well, this is where this podcast comes in to help. We all know that prioritizing customers and treating them like VIPs is key. This mindset seems to get lost when it comes to parts of the company that don’t deal directly with customers, AKA your back-office operations. And this is a problem because being customer-centric is more than just a buzzword. Your business really needs it to survive and thrive. And it also needs it in its back office as well. The question is, how does that really look like? What does it mean to be customer-centric? And isn’t having excellent customer service enough? And how do you go about transforming your business to achieve being customer-centric successfully? As a quick reminder, all of the episodes on this podcast, including this one, come with timestamps for topics that we discuss, and each one has its own blog post too, so you can find all the links and the detailed topics in this episode show notes. My guest today is Chris Hood. He is a keynote speaker, strategist, and thought leader in customer-centric cultures, artificial intelligence, and innovation. He boasts over three decades of experience in business development and is the author of “Customer Transformation,” where he provides a roadmap to customer alignment and business value, articulating transformative seven-states strategy. As the founder and CEO of Sensible AI, Chris spends his time helping businesses leverage AI and reach 10 times thinking trends.

Kathy (host):
Welcome to the show, Chris.

Chris (guest):
Well, thank you. Great to be here.

Kathy (host):
Yeah, I’m super excited you’re here because we’re going to be talking about how to develop a customer-centric environment in the business, not just in those customer-facing roles but also across the organization. You know, I see that there is a push out there to do this, to be more customer-centric, but there’s not any particular guidance on how to do it and how to do this well. So when we connect, that I got really excited because I had a couple of things that intrigued me about you. Number one is that you actually have a framework on how to do that and how to do that really good and really well. And to that, you talk about the importance of including the teams that don’t face the customers like finance, like myself, to be customer-centric also. So before we dive into this topic, I do want to start at the beginning. And can we first define for listeners what does it mean to be customer-centric? And why is this so important?

Chris (guest):
Yeah, it’s a great starting point. And I did exactly what you did: start to look around and discovered that there are a lot of opinions about what customer centricity is. And there’s definitely a push for organizations to start implementing this. But there really weren’t any strategies or frameworks to make that happen. So that’s one of the reasons I wrote my book specifically for that. But if we were to define what is a customer-centric company, that means that the entire organization is empowered and is responsible for ensuring customer success. Now, this is very hard. And a lot of times, I’ll go into an organization, and I’ll start asking questions like, how do you manage customer experience? Do you feel as if your customer experience is great? How about customer support? And everybody’s shaking their heads? Yes, yes, yes. But then when we get to the end of the conversation, well, how does your human resources department ensure customer satisfaction, they’re like they’re not customer-facing, they have nothing to do with customer satisfaction. And then you start to realize that they’re really not a customer-centric organization. And it’s that insight into how other teams that typically don’t associate themselves with the customer, where you start to find opportunities to make this really successful.

Kathy (host):
And this is really interesting for me because obviously, I’ve always said in the back office, so to speak, the non-customer-facing roles. But I do want to deep dive into this. Why is it important that the back office, so to speak, is included in these conversations? And then how do you make that happen? I mean, for finance, you could say, well, they’re part of deals. They’re part of the sales conversations, but typically for an HR, how would they be a part of that customer-centric conversation?

Chris (guest):
Well, how do you get people in your organization to align around the customer-centric approach? Operations and human resources? How do you know what types of people to bring on in order to fulfill whatever that culture is that you’re trying to achieve human resources? How do you build that culture? It starts, I usually use the phrase, it starts at day zero, it starts before somebody even comes into your organization. As you’re starting to do hiring and looking at candidates, you’ve got to understand how those individuals are going to fit into that culture that starts at human resources. They’re more or less, we don’t want to call them a gatekeeper. But they are the organization; they’re the team that is going to ensure that you’re bringing on the right people. But look, we understand that this is challenging because what happens when you lose somebody, the first instinct is we’ve got to go and replace this person. And we’re desperate, we need to fill this role. So you go off and you hire the first person you see who can do the job. And the culture is usually the last thing that anybody thinks about. It’s Can you do the job? Yes. When can you start? And can I pay you appropriately? Then it’s well, we’ll do the training. Why? Why are you worried about training after the fact? Why don’t you find somebody who has the same passion for customers, no matter what the role is? So you can ask questions during the interview process, like how do you feel your job is responsible or supports customer satisfaction? Now, that basic question could be asked of any role, and it’s going to be great, especially when they’re not prepared for that type of question. So start to dive into what are the questions I can ask that build that customer-centric culture include that as part of the hiring process, and start this process at Day Zero?

Kathy (host):
That’s a good point. And you know, someone who’s sitting in finance, as you’re talking, like I’m thinking about how does this relate to me specifically looking at the numbers. And I can give you an example. We have a local business here that is very successful; they have grown really, really fast. And they’re really big at this point. And they were a small family-owned business. And one of the interesting things about their customer service is that when you go into the customer service section, they had the answer to every reasonable request is always yes. And I love that. And how does this apply to finance is because when you’re, for example, when you’re returning things when you’re trying to buy something, and they have certain prices, and they’re very, very open to giving you deals, and if I’m looking at this from a finance perspective, returns cost money, giving pricing deals to customers cost money. So if you have someone in the business and finance, who’s only looking at the bottom line and thinking of, well, we’re going to lose money on this. But on the other hand, when you’re customer-centric, you have loyal, loyal fans and customers because of the activities that you have at the customer service. So you might lose money, short term, but long term, you’re gonna draw like they grew, or

Chris (guest):
You’re looking at it from a, we’ll call it day-to-day responsibilities. And I agree with everything you said. There’s a rationale that you can look at to determine we’re okay with returning certain things; we’re okay with adjusting. Costco comes to mind. They have $1.50 cent hotdogs and drinks. And they’ve never changed the price on that. And the CEO is mostly responsible for this, saying, We will always take a loss on that. Because we know it’s such a draw for people to come to Costco. So they take a loss at the gain of people come and shop. So there is a financial daily operational type of thing that you consider there. But this is also deeper, the understanding that the customer is a priority, if you understand that it removes those obstacles that you’re also talking about. If I come to you, and I say, hey, we were thinking about doing something and we’ve got this new idea and blah, blah, blah, there’s not a lot of back and forth. Because you understand, you recognize that we’re looking at it from a customer-centric perspective. If you have these vast opinions about how the organization should function and operate, and you live in these silos, which we’ve all been in organizations where you’re living in silos, and I have no idea what I’m doing. I have no idea how this contributes to the business. I have no idea how this helps the customer. Those types of environments are filled with well, no, I don’t want to do that. It’s not your opinion, if we should do that or not. It all goes back to does the customer need it? Is it something that’s going to help them and how is that going to ultimately grow the business? If you can remove all of those silos by having a centralized focused theme, all the better.

Kathy (host):
And it’s interesting, you know, I just talked to someone recently who, just by having conversations with the customer and being willing to change things, they added about $40 million to their business. And just by having simple conversations, which was to me, it was mind-boggling.

Chris (guest):
What’s interesting is, if you were to go around the country, just talk to random people about their jobs, and then ask what is the mission of your organization, most people, I can guarantee it, most people probably cannot recite whatever the mission statement is for the business they work for, unless maybe they’re the CEO, and you know, an entrepreneur, and you’ve got some foundation for that. But if you said, we’re a customer-centric organization, that sticks. It doesn’t really matter what the mission is, maybe you still want to achieve some grandeur thing, which is okay. But if you are customer-centric, then that’s going to resonate; people are going to recognize that. And if that’s the one thing they recognize more than your mission statement, then you win. Because that’s the whole purpose: Make your customers happy, grow your business.

Kathy (host):
Yeah, it should be really simple, you know, make your customers happy, right? Rinse and repeat as the business grows, right? So Chris, you do have a framework. And I want to dedicate the time to this framework because as we talked about, there’s not that many resources for this on the market. And you wrote a book about this. Can you walk us through this framework that you have?

Chris (guest):
Yeah, so the book, and the framework is called Customer Transformation. It’s a seven-stage strategy. The way that I look at this is what we refer to as the outside-in perspective, which basically means it starts on the outside of your organization and then flows on the inside. And as we look at this, you’re going to see why this matters. Because if you start on the outside, the place where you start is your customer, start with your customer, right? I was actually talking with a startup founder a couple of days ago on social media, and they said, I’m having a problem identifying my customers. I’m like, wait a second, that should have been the first thing you did. But what happens is, a lot of times businesses want to start with their product and their services. That’s what we say is inside out. And when you do it in that way, if you start inside, what is the technology? What is the product? What are the services I want? Then we start to think well, okay, now, how do I build that? And now, what is the experience? And wait? Do I even have a customer who wants it? So you always have to start with the customer. So the framework starts with the customer. Number one is customer; number two is interfaces, which basically says, How is the customer going to interface with you? And there’s some technology in there. And there’s a deeper conversation to that. Number three is the journey, what is the journey or the customer experience that they want to go on? Number four is the ecosystem, which is basically the world we live in, and the partnerships the community, how do you grow that, and then it comes inside, what the ecosystem sort of sits in the middle, bridging the gap between the outside and the inside. Then when you get inside, you have the culture, which is the people who are going to build this product. And then number six is the technology. And then number eight is the business or the value that you are going to generate from it. So as you’ve noticed, if you’re starting from the customer, and you’re going to the business, you’re not starting from the business and going to the customer. And if you can just wrap your mind around that one thing, you’re going to drastically change how your organization operates. And you’ll also see like technology is, you know, is number six, it’s like towards the end. And a lot of people today, they want to start with that technology. They want to go build an AI product. Why are you going to do with it, like you have to 100% of the time you have to identify a problem consumers are having, solve that problem, recognize what their needs aspirations are, and then work in words and then figure out how you’re going to generate a business around it.

Kathy (host):
And you know, as you were talking about the seven steps, I actually put them on paper down. And it’s funny because I see so many companies going from seven to one down. So the customer is actually the last step that they get to.

Chris (guest):
That’s exactly it. If we did it backward, it would be I’ve got a business idea. I’m going to figure out what technology I want to build to solve that business idea. I’m then going to build a team around it and hire people and build the culture. I’m then going to expose it in the ecosystem. I’m out there in the community. And then I’m going to figure out well, what’s that journey and experience going to be? How are they going to interact with that? And then who is the customer? And we usually get to the point of what’s the ecosystem or journey, and we start shaking our heads because we’ve realized we have no idea who the customer actually is. So if you’re working in that motion inside out, you’re always going to fail or you’re just ultimately going to have to restart, start with the customer, always first, customer-first, customer-centric, work your way in outside.

Kathy (host):
And, you know, there are so many examples of companies that do this backward, obviously, as you just said. But have you had an experience with a particular company that did this very well? And it almost did this the right way to a point?

Chris (guest):
I would say, not really. Okay. What’s interesting is, as we talked about, there’s a lot of organizations that are starting to come up with this mindset; they’re starting to make the shift. I do think that there’s some great organizations out there that do focus customer first and then start to work their way in. They’ve got a clearer understanding of what they want. But then as you get into the larger organizations, and as teams grow, and you become more enterprise, the cyclone starts to creep in. And you have different segments of your organization that have their own opinions. And those opinions kill businesses, the bias of what you feel you should be doing, and then pushing that out onto your customer is wrong. And we saw last year was filled with examples of businesses that pushed their ideals out onto the consumers, and they lost all those consumers. And this is continuing to happen. So even when you get to scale, and you become a larger organization, you have to constantly reset your mindset to, well, what does the customer want, and then let’s figure that out. Not, hey, I have an idea, oh, I don’t really care what the customer thinks, I’m going to do what I want to do, and they’re just going to buy it, hey, we’ve got the name brand, we are popular, we make a lot of money. So anything we do, they’re going to come and buy from us. That’s not the case. Today, consumers are more demanding, and more connected socially than ever before; they have tons of options; they can express their opinions on a moment-to-moment basis. If they don’t like it, they’re leaving. And if you don’t think about it in that way, you’re going to lose business. So I think from examples that we’ve seen, more organizations are starting to shift the mindset back to the customer. But it’s still a challenge for a lot of organizations to continuously do.

Kathy (host):
And how do you do this on an actionable level in the company? So let’s say that, you know, now you want to be a customer-centric company, you’re dedicated to this, like, how do you actually do this? Do you have customer service? Do you do customer research every couple of 12 months or so like? What are the activities that you are doing in the companies on a regular basis to make sure that customers are front and center for every decision that you make in the business?

Chris (guest):
So the good news is, for me, I wrote a book. And the book actually has not just the framework, but it also has action steps for you to take. So for each stage of the framework, stage one customer, here’s a list of activities that you can do within your organization, questions to ask team members to bring on board next steps, all of that is there for each stage, each of the seven stages. So you could go buy my book and then start to implement that through just the action steps that I’ve provided. But if you don’t want to buy the book, and you want to do it the hard way, then you’ve got to have this really heart-to-heart conversation across your organization. This is what we want to do. This is what we’re committed to doing and then start to proceed. You’re going to have to have teams that are strategically in place specifically to execute on this; for example, you might have a customer success management team, that customer success team will be responsible for ensuring that the transformation is happening. You’re going to have to start implementing processes and procedures. This is beyond just surveys. This is a deep-rooted understanding of what your customer wants, and surveys are just one part of that. And then you’re going to have to think about how do you monitor it, how do you gauge it? What are the metrics? What are the KPIs around it? I’ve provided a customer value alignment assessment. So there’s an assessment that asks questions, both internally and externally. And then you get the feedback from it so that you can do an alignment; you can see, here’s what our customers are saying, Here’s what our CEO believes. Here’s what our CTO believes. Here’s what our CEO, CEO, here’s what our directors believe. VPS believe here’s what our employees believe. And then once you put all of that together, you’ll start seeing where you’re misaligned, well, our CEO is completely misaligned with our employees. And our employees are completely misaligned with our customers. How do you fix that? That insight is going to help you drive continuous transformation. So building the organization, building the culture that you want, bringing people within the teams together so that they can participate, talking with your customers more frequently, value alignment, there’s a lot in here that you have to accomplish, but it’s well worth it.

Kathy (host):
Yeah, it’s it seems, it seems like it’s a process that it’s going to take a while. So there’s obviously a difference on whether you’re an enterprise level company, whether you’re a midsize business or a small business, but I want to focus specifically on the small businesses or you know, between like 3 million all the way to maybe like to 100 million, have you seen them doing this in a more efficient manner? What are the differences that you see, what are they doing versus what larger businesses are doing? Is it a faster process? Because then they don’t have so many decision makers? And you know, not that many chefs in the kitchen? What have you seen?

Kathy (host):
Yeah, it seems like it’s a process that’s going to take a while. So there’s obviously a difference on whether you’re an enterprise-level company, whether you’re a midsize business or a small business, but I want to focus specifically on the small businesses or, you know, between 3 million all the way to maybe like to 100 million. Have you seen them doing this in a more efficient manner? What are the differences that you see? What are they doing versus what larger businesses are doing? Is it a faster process? Because then they don’t have so many decision-makers? And, you know, not that many chefs in the kitchen? What have you seen?

Chris (guest):
Yeah, when you remove decision-makers and bureaucracy in your organization, things get done. Right, that’s all there is to it, right? And that’s part of the problem is, as you grow and scale your organization, and you start to offload different factors of that business without a set type of culture in place, then you start to lose control. And then you start to have chaos, really, and we talked about the hiring practices. But it’s also as you’re bringing on people, and you’re scaling. And if you’re doing that fast, then you lose a certain level of just ensuring quality and ensuring that people are on target to what you want to accomplish. Smaller organizations are always going to be a little bit more nimble, a little bit more adaptable. And so if you’ve got a team of 10, and a team of 20, even a team of 100, it’s fairly easy to get all of them into the same room and then do training and set the expectation. But it’s also the responsibility of leadership, including the CEO and down to ensure that it stays, that it sticks and that people continue to do it and are constantly reminded of it. You know, Jeff Bezos, when he was growing Amazon, on multiple occasions said, we’re doing it this way, if you don’t do it this way, you’re fired. Right? Point blank? Do you think anybody didn’t do it? No, everybody started doing it. And yet we have a lot of companies, I’m sure, you know, that are out there. Like maybe the CEO will get involved? I’m not quite sure who’s responsible for this? And, yeah, oh, you know, you didn’t do it that one time, it’s okay. We’ll look the other way. For now. All of that is just deteriorating your culture. So you have to be very firm on what you want to accomplish and then stick to it.

Kathy (host):
Yeah, and I agree. And this has been an issue, especially with growing businesses because as you’ve been doing things a certain way, and now you want to improve it, you have to bring those people with you. And a lot of the people resent the different way of doing it. And you have all sorts of opinions. But we’ve always done it this way, which are the worst couple of words in business, and we’ve always done it this way. It’s, yeah. So it’s the change management and doing this in the right way really, really makes a difference, what I’ve seen. And as you said, you know, at the end of the day, it’s like, if people don’t want to change with you and change with your organization, then it’s better to separate and them be happy somewhere else, and you grow the business without them.

Chris (guest):
There’s also the reverse side of this, which is the illusion that you’re changing for the right way. There’s examples of companies that have said, we’re changing, we’re transforming, here’s what we’re becoming, we’re not going to continue to do things the way we’ve always done it. But unfortunately, those are also often filled with biased opinions and are not typically customer-centric. And so changing just for the sake of change is not necessarily good. You have to ensure that you’re changing for, again, the value of your consumers, even if you believe that you have the consumers’ best interest at hand. And it’s usually not unless they are included in that process. I’ve always argued, include your customers actually in the transformation process and figure out how to include them, get the voice of the customer involved with those decision-making. That way, you’re not liable to change with some other mystical reason that doesn’t really resonate with them.

Kathy (host):
Do you have any good examples of companies that you work with that included the customer? And how did that look like for them?

Chris (guest):
A great example of this is Taco Bell. Taco Bell actively reaches out to their loyal fan base; they know who they are. Anytime there’s a new menu item, they expose that at local restaurants for people to come in and try. So if you’ve ever seen a new Taco on the menu, most likely that has been tested by actual customers who have taste-tested it and have shared their opinions. There are countless times when menu items don’t get included because they’ve rolled it out, people have tasted it and said, “I would never buy this.” Right. So I think you’ve got to think about it creatively; you don’t have to, again, necessarily go and have these surveys. But a lot of the enterprises, for example, will do councils; they’ll do customer councils, where they will pick strategic people who will come together, and they group up once a month. Where are we on our product? Where are you as our customer? What are you thinking? What are you hearing out there? So you can do this on a regular basis. It doesn’t even have to be a one-time or one-off thing. It’s getting into the motion of having them participate in some way, let alone social media; you should be actively looking at social media. What are people talking about? What are people saying about us? What are the newest trends? Whoa, what we just went viral on TikTok? For some reason, because somebody used us in whatever, like, you’ve got to have that pulse on what the customers are saying. And it doesn’t always mean inviting them to the table. But why not invite them to the table? And why not have your CEO go and actively sit down with people and talk to them? There’s not too many organizations where the CEO will go and sit down with a group of people and talk to them about their experiences, smaller organizations, yes, large organizations, no. And the number one complaint is, “I’m too busy.” You’re too busy to keep your customers happy. That’s the problem that shows you that you’re not a customer-centric organization. Because you care more about your personal experiences and your personal schedule. And whatever else you’ve got going on, then your customers; you don’t have customers, you don’t have a business.

Kathy (host):
Yeah, so it’s prioritizing really customer through every single position in the business, especially the CEO position.

Chris (guest):
A good example of this is Bud Light. Last year, you know, had a fiasco; the CEO came out with a press release. And the CEO specifically said, “Look, we hear you, and we’re going to make some actions. But to our partners, we’re going to take care of you; to our frontline workers, we’re also going to take care of you and to our customers, we’re going to change our marketing strategy. Now. I look at this as a great case example case study and priorities; you put your customer last, and the customer was the thing, the entity that you were struggling with the most. To even further highlight this, if you solve the customer issue, your frontline workers and your partners would be taken care of; you do not have to call them out. The customer is your priority. First and foremost, no matter what. The fact that you put the customer third on a list shows you that you’re out of touch with who your customers are, and that you are not a customer-centric organization.

Kathy (host):
You know, it’s interesting; like, why do you think that is? Why did that develop? Because when we’re talking about this, and you know, we’re 30 minutes into this conversation. It just seems so obvious, right? Yeah. Like, why is this such an issue? Yeah.

Chris (guest):
I asked myself that question. And obviously, I get asked that question a lot. And again, it just boils back to people are just not in tune with it. People are just not; they believe that there are higher priorities than their customers. They believe that they’re above it all that we are a customer we are a brand we are a business people will come to us we build it people will come and yet I mean, we’ve seen Disney as an example lose almost a billion dollars last year in content development because they didn’t listen to their customers and Disney you would naturally think is a customer-centric organization, it used to be, but it isn’t. Because it’s all about the profits. It’s all about money. It’s all about big business. It’s all about the stocks and everything else. And yet they lose sight that if they make their customers happy, they will generate the money. But look, we’re filled with a world of personal agendas, and cultural and social economical conditions, political statements that are just disrupting the pure concept that consumers are first. So

Kathy (host):
I would assume that you agree then with this customer is always right sentence is true, or No.

Chris (guest):
First two pages in my book, I start off by saying when I was young, my first job 17 years old, I was taught that the customer’s always right. And I think from there, there are some slight nuances to that statement; I don’t necessarily think the customer’s always right, or nor do I think that they’re always reasonable, especially today, they’re definitely not. But there’s an element to that that I think you have to make sense of. And that is that even though they might not always be right, and maybe they’re not always reasonable in bulk, they are. And so if you have 100 customers, and one of them shouts throughout social media that you’re an awful company, it’s okay that if the other 99 think you’re fabulous, if the other 99 say, “I think you should add this feature,” and one person says you don’t, you should probably add the feature. So you have to look at this holistically and come to the realization that even though customers may have their very strong opinions at times, underneath it all, there is some guidance that you should be following. And you’ve got to look at that and do the research and analyze it, and then make those decisions, again, with the customer first in mind.

Kathy (host):
So it’s more about looking at the trends and patterns and customers versus specifically just looking at one type.

Chris (guest):
One struggle that a lot of organizations have, especially startups is they’re desperate for customers. So you get a customer that comes in, and they say I love your product, but I wish it was blue. And so what do you do? You go and change it to blue to satisfy that one customer? Then you get a second customer comes in and says, “Yeah, I wish it was red.” Now you’ve got two customers with completely different opinions. And so what do you do, you create one blue and one red, you’re duplicating all your efforts, and you’re struggling, because all you’re trying to do is satisfy your customers. And then as you grow, you get 10 and 15 and 20. And you’re in this mode of trying to appease every single customer with their own separate type of personalized experience. And it ultimately doesn’t work. You can’t scale that way. So you do have to look at the trends and the percentages and make strategic decisions; you’re not always going to make customers happy. And in which case, you have to ask yourself, well, maybe they’re not the right customer; all the people who want red may be not the right customer. And it’s okay. I know this is so hard for people to hear. It’s okay to say goodbye to those customers. And then go stick with the people who want blue and go make them happy and find more people who want blue, because that’s how you succeed, solve the problems for a group of people, make them happy. Make money. It’s basic, a hard part is saying goodbye to customers who are paying you who might not be totally aligned with what you’re trying to accomplish.

Kathy (host):
And I see this happening so much with the businesses that I work with. And I always say to them, not all money is good money. Yeah, yeah. But yeah, so hard because but because it feels so visceral. It’s I am turning business away; I feel dirty. I am saying no to getting money. It’s like, yes. But you’re saying yes to the money that is going to make your business a lot easier. You’re going to be solving problems for this particular group of customers. And it’s just you’re a better fit for them than the other people out there.

Chris (guest):
Yeah, and there’s some logic behind this. If you had 10 customers giving you $10 a month, or one customer giving you $100 a month, which one would you prefer; you would go with the 10 for 10. Because the odds are, they’re going to give you more months, and you’re going to make up the loss of the other one person for 100. Right? So you got to take some of the emotion out of it. And that is the hardest thing to do.

Kathy (host):
And also the hardest part is to win you have these big customers, and I’ve seen this like, you know, you might have two customers giving you $100 each month, and then you have a lot of small ones. And then the two big ones are demanding a certain type of service, certain types of features. And now, most of your revenue is tied to these two people. And there’s a lot of risk in order Eat organization because of that. So you really have to make a decision, where are you going to go?

Chris (guest):
Yeah, because what if you produce a feature, you waste all of your time, energy, and budget on a feature that one of those big customers want, but then you realize that none of your other customers want it. Or even worse, some of your customers leave because you implement a feature that they don’t need. And they just think, well, there’s no point in me spending money on this anymore, right? So this is why you have to really sit down and look at it from a purely logical viewpoint, do the research, analyze it make decisions based on the good of the majority, as opposed to you know, the profits of the minority?

Kathy (host):
That’s a great conversation we had, Chris, and you know, every single podcast episode, I try to end with something that is actionable for the listener who has a growing business, and they’re trying to implement this in their business, you gave us the seven steps, you have a book out there. But if someone is to really trying to get their business to be more customer-centric, what is the one next actionable thing that they can take in the next week or two, to get them to that goal?

Chris (guest):
First, it’s a decision, somebody has to make that decision. And usually, it’s the CEO, and the CEO has to make the decision and stick with it. This is so hard to do, even from the ground up. Like you can’t do grassroots on this; it’s got to be at the top, and it has to flow down. So somebody has to make that decision. The next thing is, you have to start to implement operationally ongoing activities that are going to focus on this. So team meetings, you can start a team meeting by saying something like, “Does anybody have anything to share from a customer perspective?” You as employees should also all be customers of whatever the product is and whatever the company is that you work for. It’s amazing to me how many people work for companies, and they aren’t actually the customers of that company. So you got to kind of get into that mindset as well. And you can do random things. This is great for organizations in person. And this also comes from Jeff Bezos at Amazon, in his boardroom, he would have one MTC, and that empty seat would always be there for every single meeting, and that seat represented the customer. And so just walking in, you would see an empty seat and think of it; you would have this reaction that the customer is present. If we talk about things like this all the time, if we were having a conversation in private, and we said, “Well, what would you think if your significant other was sitting in on this conversation with us?” Right? What if your boss what if your priest what if somebody was sitting in what if the customer was sitting in on the conversation we’re having right now about our organization? What do you think they would be saying? If you have that mindset, and by having like that seat as a representation that somebody from the customer is sitting there listening in, you might change some of the conversations; you might change the way you’re looking at things. So that type of mindset, that shift has to happen. And again, start at the CEO, start to implement some of these activities within your meetings and throughout your organization. And then start to look at the harder things like hiring practices and metrics and feedback loops and surveys. All of those things can come after, but the mandate has to be first.

Kathy (host):
That’s a great, that’s a really great tip. I especially love this whole customer present in the meeting because it’s a visual reminder that hey, it’s not about us. It’s really about the customer, who’s unfortunately not here, but it’s gonna affect all the decisions we make. It’s gonna affect them down the road, right? Chris, where can people find you?

Chris (guest):
Best way to find me is on my website, ChrisHood.com. See ChrisHood.com. And there you can find my book, my social media profiles, feel free to reach out, connect anytime. Any question you have, just reach out, read, and

Kathy (host):
I’m going to put all of these in the show notes. So there’s going to be his LinkedIn, his website, and any information that you need; it’s going to be in there. So if you didn’t quite catch that, just go look at the show notes. Thanks so much, Chris. Sure. Thanks.