Customer-Focused Strategy Development
"Excellent service is ultimately cheaper than average service. Therefore, don't leave customer delight to chance."“Do you feel bad enough to make changes now, or would you rather wait?”
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Turn your company into a modern and unique one that consistently focuses on customer benefits and leaves the competition behind.
You receive a strategy that is consistently focused on the customer and you know where you need to take action. You develop a prioritized set of measures (today often called backlog) and receive a process how you can work through and/or adapt them independently without further external support if desired.
No academic gymnastics. Pragmatic, comprehensible procedure with tools from competence areas such as corporate strategy development, service design thinking, business modeling, business engineering or process engineering. Combined with agile process methods. The tools are selected and adapted in such a way that they can be quickly grasped by the people involved and later applied independently.
Our Approach
Our approach ensures that your strategy sustainably satisfies customer needs and that everyone in the company is clear about what your company stands for and how customer delight can be staged.
With our proven strategy process, you can realign your company in a customer and service-oriented way in just a few weeks.
Because customer delight should not be random. Customer enthusiasm must be repeatable. In addition, the procedure guarantees that the necessary change actually takes place and that you get into action. You will receive all the tools and the necessary knowledge to implement the strategy independently if you wish to do so.
The great advantage of customer orientation
The five most important results of your customer and service-oriented strategy
#1
A clear vision
A key to success is a clear vision, which we sharpen together if necessary.
This vision will quickly reveal whether the company is sufficiently well-positioned, serves the “right” customers, and employs the “right” people and “partners.”
You can still be one of those that differentiates itself from the competition early on through its customer focus and customer engagement.
Even though many talks about customer experience management and about digital transformation, and market research regularly reveals that 4 out of 5 executives already consider designing customer experience paths to be important, few ultimately take action. Or they fail because they do not view the topic holistically enough or, similar to customer relationship management (CRM), view it purely as an information topic.
“In a 2011 study, Right Now Technologies found that 89% of customers switch to a competitor after just one unsatisfactory customer experience and do not return.”( Right Now Technologies study)
#2
Customer focus and customer engagement
#3
Rapid feedback
You’ll be able to quickly see from customer feedback, but also from employee and partner feedback, that the investment has paid off.
Customers become loyal fans who recommend you to others and who will order from you again and again. Your marketing and sales costs can be reduced in the long term and the resources used to inspire even more customers. Your sales will increase at lower costs, which will increase your profits accordingly.
Our strategy process for reorganizing a company to be customer and service-oriented.
After an initial setup and the management’s decision to consistently set up the company in a customer and service-oriented way (Go CX +), a kick-off is first carried out with the entire team. The goal is to involve as many people as possible in the strategy process. This generates a high level of acceptance and accelerates the transformation. After that, trend, environment, customer and company analyses are carried out first. The initial situation is concluded with a strengths and weaknesses analysis (SWOT – Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, Threats). From this, we work out your future positioning and we consider how the company can re/improve the customer experience. Inspiring customer experiences are better not left to chance, but they are to be set up in such a way that customer delight is repeatable.
We condense the new strategy into a strategy map that is easy to communicate. This clearly shows on a single page what we want to achieve and change.
A vision, mission and beautiful guiding principles are not yet a strategy. The strategy shows the measures that are necessary to breathe life into the positioning. We tackle this next, i.e. we think about all or as many measures as possible that are needed to implement our strategy and summarize them in a backlog. We also think about the criteria according to which the measures should be prioritized.
Most strategies fail because they are not implemented. Very few companies actually manage to implement their – perhaps really good and promising – strategy. Around 75% of all strategies fail for this reason, among others. The strategy process and the implementation process somehow do not fit together.
The strategy process of The Black Elephant therefore also includes steps to ensure precisely this transformation into the company. Our approach ensures that the ability to innovate is anchored in the company and ensures that the company can improve sustainably in the longer term.
Depending on the size of the company or the size of the team for which the strategy is to be developed, the actual elaboration and the process of getting through it then take place in about 4 to 6 workshops and the additional preparatory and follow-up work.
The goal is to inspire customers with products and services that they want (desirable), that are feasible for us (feasible) and that are viable and sustainable.
The 3 essential differences of
The Black Elephant® strategy process
Our approach ensures that your strategy sustainably satisfies customer needs and that everyone in the company is clear about what your company stands for and how customer delight can be staged.
After all, customer delight should not be random. Customer delight must be able to be staged in a repeatable manner. In addition, the procedure guarantees that the necessary change actually takes place and that you get into action. You get all the tools and the necessary knowledge to implement the strategy on your own if you wish to do so.
At first glance, our approach may look like a standard strategy process, but there are three key differences
The three essential differences of
The Black Elephant® strategy process are:
The Black Elephant® strategy process are:
Difference #1: Consistent customer focus (Customer Centricity)
Already at the setup and team composition stage, an initial, brief stakeholder analysis is conducted.
It is important that we put the teams together correctly. As much as possible, everyone should be involved in some way. We all have customer-supplier relationships, even if they are “just” internal.
Throughout the strategy process, employees and, ideally, business partners and customers need to be involved. But in any case, a wide variety of methods and tools are used to really take the customer’s point of view. Where others stop with the analysis, we go one step further and analyze the customer experience path (internal and external), the integrative interaction of process fragments from the customer’s point of view (end-to-end processes), the actual customer processes – because that is often not what we mean – as well as the needs, concerns, desires that arise from them. We take into account different types of people and also include the context in our considerations.
Difference #2: Structured action planning
Another key difference is to specifically address the target staging of customer experiences.
Most of them omit this step.
This then also has an effect on the planning of measures.
Here, it is particularly important that we get rid of everything that is no longer necessary according to the new positioning, the future business model and the target staging. We are literally getting rid of ballast – which will then also have a very positive impact on our costs. And we define the measures to develop or build up the previously defined differentiators.
Many strategy processes end here. It’s often a case of “nothing but expenses”.
The strategy still has to be implemented. Many companies have the most difficulty with this. They do not have an established process for driving change forward sustainably and continuously. This is also to the benefit of the end customers, but also of the employees and business partners.
Difference #3: Agile, iterative implementation
Most strategies fail because they are not implemented. One reason is that many struggle with prioritizing actions and launching action implementation projects.
The agile approach ensures that results are produced in a defined regularity. It is also called timeboxing.
The timebox that my customers have often chosen so far is 6 weeks. I.e. every 6 weeks something is implemented and introduced again.
As a rule, one takes on a lot, starts some and completes the least. We can prevent this with the recommended procedure.
Methods and Tools
in The Black Elephant® Strategy Process
In our approach, we combine methods and tools from the
- Classical strategy processes, especially strategic analysis and strategy development,
- Service Design Thinking,
- Customer experience management,
- Architecture and business process management, and
- Agile management methods.
The latter in particular, as actual action planning and strategy implementation, are also especially important to us.
