You have too many initiatives – consider rationing centricity

Saying that you are dedicated to customer centricity sounds admirable right up to the moment that you realise just how insatiable customers are…and how expensive that is.

No organisation should pursue the absolute position of being customer-centric. There is a diminishing return which means that at some point, the marginal benefit of being customer-centric is less than the marginal cost. It would be idealistic, but reckless, to the organisation’s prosperity to eradicate every point of customer friction.

Somewhere hidden amongst these unfiltered pain points and initiatives are drivers for markedly changing the customer experience and positively altering the trajectory of the organisation. These are the pain points directly impacting on the primary drivers of defection and other organisational outcomes. Because of the absence of science in identifying these key drivers, the important initiatives are often buried amongst the unimportant ones and so, there is insufficient investment, endurance and tenacity levelled at the initiatives that count.

CONCLUSION:
Intuition and judgement are the most prevalent operating models in CEX management, resulting in a hefty overhead for organisations that treat CEX as an ideology rather than an organisational discipline. Marketing science linking the proposed initiative with a lead indicator is required to screen proposed CEX initiatives.