A growing number of successful organisations are identifying improved customer focus as an area worth concentrating on. If every employee is dedicated to engaging with and meeting every customer’s needs, the business can benefit significantly.

Not only will this have a positive impact on the organisation’s bottom line, it will also encourage better understanding and therefore a stronger, more interactive relationship to develop between the organisation and its customers, improving customer satisfaction, customer loyalty and ultimately the reputation of the brand.

The Loop Communication Agency has developed a five-point plan, to represent how this kind of initiative can be realised:

Step 1: The current climate - what is the current situation? What do you have in place today, and how effective is this? Where does your organisation sit on the continuum between Product Centred and Customer Centred?

Step 2: Defining the outcome – what will the end destination look and feel like? How will employee behaviour change? What measurables are there to tell you if you have succeeded or failed?

Step 3: Planning how to get there - what is the vision? Who is involved in driving the initiative? What processes / structures / cultures need changing? What will your defining principles of Customer Centricity be? Crucially, who is your customer? Can every employee picture the customer, and relate to their needs?

Step 4: Getting your colleagues on board - Communicating the future to every employee and engaging them with the initiative

Step 5: Embedding new thinking - integrating the initiative into the culture of the organisation, taking steps to ensure that the initiative underpins how employees work, rather than being an add-on.

The complexity of this process is indicative of the long-term nature of turning the focus of your organisation towards your customers. It is not a quick win. Devising an effective, workable, customer focus initiative is a positive step forwards, but the initiative cannot succeed without the support of your employees. Informing and educating is an important part of the process, but the key is to gain employee buy-in: to engage your employees with your new initiative.

The Loop has recently put this plan into practice for BP Lubricants. In large organisations, the customer risks becoming a faceless entity – this is particularly true for employees who do not have a customer-facing role. The Loop’s creative solution for BP was to embody ‘the customer’ in an identifiable figure that every employee could relate to. The Loop created a fictional character called Bob Rogers, from a fictional car dealership, Lexington. Bob was representative of ‘everybody’s customer’, whilst maintaining his own specific identity.

The Loop’s solution highlights the importance of encouraging your employees to think about your customers as individuals, rather than as an homogenous mass. Every organisation can ask themselves, "Who’s my Bob?" Once your customer has been identified, your employees will be able to see more clearly how their actions might impact this customer. You will have a range of customers, and their needs will vary, but what unites them? What must your organisation deliver to ensure their satisfaction?

The Loop produced a video for BP, shown to employees at conferences across the globe, to demonstrate what customer satisfaction would look and feel like. In the video, BP employees took the time to communicate with Bob, to keep him informed and involved. They included Bob in all they did, keeping him at the centre of their activities – their first thought was "What about Bob?"

By identifying your Bob, and encouraging the "what about Bob?" mentality, you can begin the shift towards customer centricity.

At the heart of your Customer Focus initiative must be communication. Without communicating the initiative to your employees, and without engaging them with it, the initiative remains an ‘add-on’ – sitting on top of your current culture.

By showing employees what customer focus looks like, and exactly what its benefits are, you can engage them with the vision. An effective engagement process can ingrain customer focus into culture of your organisation, so that the initiative underpins both planning and delivery. Customer focus then becomes your starting point, rather than an after thought.