If you start reading and suspect my propeller is rotating too fast, be patient (or read the last full paragraph first to get the customer implications).

My colleague and Microsoft “super-partner” Jack Boyer of Boyer & Associates recently interviewed me regarding appropriateness of implementing MS Dynamics AX ERP software suites (including CRM) in smaller than enterprise venues. I happen to believe that AX can be implemented affordably in SME organizations that control configuration costs by limiting customer configuration to critical functionality. Well, apparantly so do the folks in Redmond, because they’ve repeated the post on their partner site.

So why is a customer-centric process designer like me writing a propeller-head post like this?

Simple. Implementing customer-centric process almost always requires replacing older, company-centric technology that can’t bend enough to support new and different process designed to add more value to customers. That’s where Dynamics AX becomes relevant. The “AX” platform supports extreme configurability – but custom-configuring everything under the sun increases implementation costs beyond most SME budget thresholds. Fortunately, SME organizations can control implementation costs by running AX out of the box wherever possible – and saving custom configuration for supporting “customer home run” processes that most systems don’t support out of the box. Restraint is hard, I know. But if that’s what it takes to add new value to customers through properly aligned process and technology, it’s worth it.

You can read the full post at http://tinyurl.com/7frghem. 

Last week I wrote about the difficulties Best Buy CEO Brian Dunn was having meeting customer expectations, which had been raised by previous CEO and visionary Brad Anderson, who retired. Today, Dunn is done. Victim of being a nuts and bolts operating manager for a company that needed another visionary. Best Buy badly needed someone at the helm committed to meeting and exceeding customer expectations – including shifting BB’s operating model to meet shifting customer preferences. An interim CEO from the Board will take command while the company searches for a new CEO.

What do you think chances are Best Buy knows what to look for this time?

Best Buy just announced a plan to take out 50 stores, 400 HQ jobs and many thousands of store employees. They blame the need to scale down on overbuilding. I blame it on shabby treatment of customers that’s driven buyers out the doors.

Just several years ago many of us were singing the praises of Best Buy and CEO Richard Anderson for taking a customer-eye view of their business – including extensive staff training and upgrading retail floor talent. But then Anderson retired, they hired Brian Dunn as new CEO, and Dunn’s first pronouncements addressed profitability and efficiency, not customers. The writing was on the wall. Back to the old, company-centric business model – which today’s customers aren’t buying, just as they’re not buying Best Buy’s merchandise.

Sure enough, lots of formerly loyal customers, myself included, now use Best buy as a store of last resort. So they’re not lying about being overbuilt. But they aren’t fessing up to the true reason. And so they’ll double down on what they’re doing wrong and morph into “Worst Buy.” It was good shopping with you – while customer-centric thinking lasted.

Have you ever watched an entire business category slide below the horizon? I first did while too young to understand what I was watching – as passenger and mixed passenger/freight railroads didn’t make the bend. But even when I hit graduate school years later the “Penn Central” case study was still very current. Classic example of not changing business model in the face of rapid environmental change.

Since then we’ve all seen more sectors fade from sight. Everything from neighborhood full service groceries; to specialty consumer a/v stores; to big, powerful cars that could pass everything but a gas station; and more recently, we’ve witnessed the demise of mid-sized airlines, mid-priced jewelers plus shoe store and bookstore chains. And we’re now inexorably heading towards the end of client-server computing (outside of extreme speed enterprise stuff) and even PCs themselves.

But what’s next? Are we ready for online niche categories to fade away, just as brick and mortar business categories did? I believe online travel services are toast, as are a plethora of social media services. And Are we ready to turn traditional healthcare on its ear? I suspect we’re reaching the end of medical clinics staffed by FPs and GPs. Likewise physical tax preparation services and perhaps all tax preparation services.  A simplified tax code would send most of the accounting industry packing.

So what’s on your candidate list for extinction?

While I don’t want to sound like a process guy forever ragging on software companies, here we go again. After completing an enterprise process redesign; identifying explicit technology enablement requirements; conducting a search to find the best application fit (we will have to integrate two systems), we selected Company X, which assured us they would tailor their implementation to what we’ve already done and where we are.

Baloney (or is it bologna). Sales transitions the job over to the implementation team, and then we receive a cookie-cutter implementation plan that starts with (get this) 4 days of meetings with me and my client’s management team to redesign our process to suit the software. Wow! Breathtaking arrogance! Then we meet resistance when we ask for a “sandbox” so client managers and I (haven’t implemented this one before) can start identifying what functionality we’ll use and what we’ll hide – plus familiarize ourselves with the interface and start pulling together the data they’ll need to configure the system our way. Hey, why do we need that. They’ll show us how we’ll use their system, after they straighten out our process.

They’re now starting to catch on, but it’s truly hard for them to comprehend how our process, designed before we met them, should drive their technology. Foreign concept, totally. Sometimes I have to pinch myself and remember we’re still living in the past. Before customers started taking over buyer-seller relationships. And before we realized process has to drive technology, not the other way round.

Please click through to our site for more about building customer-centric organizations.

We all know from personal experience how this plays out on the customer front lines. You call Microsoft, Intuit, HP or whatever’s customer support and get someone speaking a barely intelligible version of your language (if you’re lucky). This person is obviously measured on call count, because he keeps pushing to end the call, problem resolved or not. I even had an HP call marked “successfully closed” or some such despite the “tech” unable to even identify my admittedly exotic monitor, never mind know how to rotate the screen 90 degrees back to normal.

But “behind the lines,” including at management levels, I see stress from excess workload, micromanagement enabled by micro-measurement and fear of losing a job keep internal concerns, including self-preservation, ascendant over customer concerns. Work is becoming more and more about pleasing the boss, which is often antithetical to pleasing customers. Our “pressure-cooker” corporate environments are not conducive to putting customers first.

Your thoughts?

 Please click through to our site for more about building customer-centric organizations.

Rephrasing the question, how far will customer-centric attitude and desire to help customers take an organization?

In my mind, not very far. Yes, process is my practice focal point, but I don’t believe I’m being biased. After every customer relationship audit, I come up with change recommendations that can be categorized as: “behavioral;” “process-based;” “process plus technology” based. The latter two categories almost always dominate the list.

What do you think?

Please click through to our site for more about building customer-centric organizations.

Over the holidays, several times I caught myself experiencing a knee-jerk negative reaction to less than customer-centric behavior by companies supposedly being among the customer-centric elite. For example, Southwest Airlines is vigorously opposing a proposed new FAA regulation mandating more rest for pilots between flights. Not very customer-friendly behavior, considering the significant percentage of fatal air crashes resulting from pilot fatigue.

But in this case and others, I found myself fighting against allowing the perfect to become the enemy of the good. Southwest IS a very customer-centric company, overall. So is Verizon Wireless, especially against the backdrop of a customer-unfriendly industry. So is McDonalds, even while pushing back against proposed new food labeling laws. And won’t applying “purity tests” penalize such companies for making all the progress they’ve made?

Now, that doesn’t mean I’m willing to forgive a Best Buy for preaching customer-centricity while they’re completely falling off the wagon.  But shouldn’t we (myself included) cut the relatively good actors some slack?

Please click through to our site for more about building customer-centric organizations.

I’ve read and heard many starry eyed, wistful, expressions binding employee-centricity to customer-centricity, and the corollary.  It’s a warm and fuzzy, feel-good thought. And it ain’t true.

For example, retail shoppers are getting more and more revved up about “Black Friday” (day after Thanksgiving Christmas shopping, for those across the ponds). They’ve even pushed many stores to open at Thursday midnight – technically 12:00 Friday morning). Employees hate it. How would you like to eat a BIG, sleep-inducing dinner and down a LARGE volume of accompanying wine, sleep a couple of hours and then stagger off to work? How the hell can you enjoy the holiday all edgy over having to drag your butt off the couch, climb in your car and head off to work at Target, Best Buy, wherever? Hey, your car may even get so ticked off it won’t start. And when you get there, you get to witness shoppers stomping over dying people (literally) and dousing each other with pepper spray to get the last, latest Apple gadget.

This is classic “customer vs. employee,” and there’s no pleasing both sides. In fact, we can all come up with many examples of opposing interests between customers and employees. We need to wipe the stars out of our eyes and deal with this “unpleasant truth.”

Please click through to our site for more about building customer-centric organizations.

Next year, U.S. political candidates will bombard U.S. voters with unprecedented numbers of political messages emanating from an unprecedented number of communication sources. These politicians and their communicators arm themselves with scads of data slicing and dicing the voting populace into a myriad of overlapping cells – and even individual households. These data tell them where and where not to campaign, depending on demographics, psychographics, past voting patterns and the like. And they will even help candidates decide what to say – in person, on the stump.

Nonetheless, political communication is almost all single message “push.” Candidates and their handlers craft messages to appeal to the entire mass populace – not little cells, never mind individuals. Just like marketers do, and we all know most marketers aren’t the most customer-friendly types. And when the winners get to wherever they’re going, they’re driven by percentages, not people – and by the loudest voices, never the most thoughtful. This is one reason there’s such a politician – voter gap, with voters constantly unhappy they “didn’t get what they voted for” – because politicians don’t understand what they really want.

Wouldn’t it be wonderful instead if politicians actually practiced the two-way communication they brag about every time they say, “I listen to my constituents.” Yeah, right. And that the common interests of diverse but reasoned voices drove their votes, as should happen in a democracy. You know – becoming voter-centric by hearing all voices instead of counting the loudest, and by putting themselves in voter shoes and actually walking the voters’ walk.

Or would it be all that wonderful?