The Customer Is At The Heart Of Everything We Do?

Mathew Pearce, Global Head of Performance & Strategy, GB & M Finance, HSBC

I am not a technologist. I am a user of technology. I am a stakeholder in the success of the business divisions I support. I have customers. Not the traditional external customers but rather the ‘internal customer’. Are they treated the same though? Do we ascribe as much focus to the needs and satisfaction of the internal customer as we do the external customer? Certainly, the internal customers are a captive audience. They cannot very well pop next door to use a different supplier; a different Finance department for example. Nothing quite like a monopoly to set expectations low. There is opportunity to be had through applying the same exacting degree of customer excellence to our internal customers. Never more so than when we embark on transformation programs to provide quality Insight & Analysis to our customers through the development of Visualisation tools, as we have done in the Finance team supporting HSBC’s investment bank. Here are my reflections. Here on, I shall refer to any initiative of innovation or transformation or like project as ‘program’.

“The customer is at the heart of everything we do”. Impressive sounding words. Google it. Once you skip past the adverts you will find a plethora of recognisable companies exposing this ambition for their customers. Is it as true though for our internal customers? Usually relegated to being called ‘stakeholders’ or ‘users’, because we could not bring ourselves to calling colleagues ‘customers’, soon they are more a myth than an accessible living, breathing embodiment of whom we are trying to satisfy. ‘Customer’ is such a powerful term. We should be adopting the same terminology and the same approach for all our customers.

Storyboarding and mapping of our customers’ personas and our customers’ journeys are our compass to where we are heading with our program. Our program plan should afford the time upfront to chart these and our program management discipline should ensure that work streams and initiatives are aligned throughout and explain themselves through descriptions of customer personas and journeys. We should afford sufficient opportunity for retrospectives that include review of the progress vs  the personas and journeys laid out.

Engaging customers to seek feedback and participation throughout the program is a vital barometer of the level of satisfaction that will be achieved from the program delivery, and saves time by closing expectation gaps quickly and early. Firstly, in terms of the timing of feedback, limiting to just the beginning and the end of a program denies us valuable information. Knowledge is power. Conventional wisdom leads us to develop in sprints, and the approach to the periodicity of customer feedback should follow a similar ambition throughout the program. Secondly, consideration of the quality of feedback is equally important. Internally-focussed programs offer us a greater opportunity than externally-focussed ones, and we should take advantage. We should expect and demand greater engagement from our internal customers. An interactive audience is an engaged audience. We should consider how we engage them: include customers in the constituency of our program delivery teams to have the customer literally at the heart of what we do and improve team empathy; workshop out solutions together with our customers so they have a stronger connection to the end product; host more intense focus groups and demo feedback; and we may seek feedback more regularly, persistently with the same customers, and from a larger percentage of the population than we might achieve in external customer surveys. Thirdly, we should ensure our program plan includes sufficient agility to adopt customer feedback: ongoing feedback loops and scope for design increments from feedback through agile sprints.

“There Can Be More To A Technology Program Than Zeroes And Ones. Our Program Should Assess The Cultural Change Implications And How We Will Ensure That Our Customers Are Supported To Ensure Maximum Adoption”

Good communication with customers throughout is powerful. It creates confidence, inclusion and adoption eagerness. Our program plan must have a communications plan, which should have clear objectives and activities to address each one, and communications should not be an afterthought at the end of the agenda. Let us commit to go beyond ‘the newsletter’. Let us commit to avoid fake news and stick to tangible impactful successes. Let us not be shy to communicate failures. Reality shows have proved to be very engaging with audiences. Our story should be engaging. We should celebrate successful launches with our customers, and we should invite satisfied customers to be vocal ambassadors; as much as possible our customers are our greatest spokespersons.

It is also important to recognise when we are creating incremental functionality to existing tools and methods, and when we are driving a cultural change for our customers. The program may have a significant impact to the working culture for our customers: in how they work, the operating model, the tools they use, what skills they are expected to have, and what level of performance they are expected to achieve. There can be more to a technology program than zeroes and ones. Our program should assess the cultural change implications and how we will ensure that our customers are supported to ensure maximum adoption.

Imagine our world where internally-focussed programs are indistinguishable in how they are run from externally-focussed ones; to have the entire organisation ‘think customer’.

 

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