Closing the delivery gap: How to achieve true customer-led growth - Audio slideshow with text transcript

Thank you very much for your interest in the topic of customer-led growth. I want to take just a couple minutes to both lay out why we think this is important but then also go through the frameworks and approaches we use with top companies to drive organic growth.

The problem is that everybody thinks they're customer focused. In fact, we've interviewed management teams where 95% of them have said, "Yes, we're customer focused"; 80% said, "We have segmentation" and 80% said, "We're delivering a superior customer experience." 

When you look at the customer, you get a different story.  When we've looked at the same group of companies, only 8% of their customers actually believe they're delivering a superior customer experience.  And we call that a delivery gap.  So really, what we've tried to focus on in our approach to customer-led growth is, How do you close that delivery gap?  

Well, basically, the message for customer-led growth is pretty simple. We love to quote Andy Taylor, the CEO of Enterprise Rent-A-Car, when he says, "The only way to grow a business is to get customers to come back for more and tell their friends."

As we thought about that and looked at what great companies have done, effectively that's what they do with their approach to organic growth.  They understand what their customers really want; we call that the design phase. They keep the promises they make, and we call that the deliver phase-where you actually deliver what you intend to. And they keep listening as things change, and we talk about that as they develop the right capabilities to keep an ongoing dialogue with their customers. 

So as we've thought about those "Three D's," what we've done is, we've looked at a lot of great companies that have grown sustainably. We've tried to identify what are the five or six things that they absolutely do well to achieve growth. And those are listed in the slide. But rather than go through those in detail, let me just try to bring them to life in each example.  So think about design picking the right segmentation and designing the right propositions. 

A great example of that is what Vodafone has done. Vodafone has 150 million customers, but as an organization they talk about seven very distinct customer segments.  Everybody in the organization understands who those customer segments are and what they want. And as they go to the market, they have very different propositions.  So Vodafone Live is very much at targeted at teens and young, active, fun users.  It's got every possible widget and gadget to make your mobile phone experience a great one. Vodafone Simply, which is targeted at older consumers and those that don't want the technology whiz and bang, is a simplified phone that gives people the exact kind of communications they need.
  

And with this very targeted set of propositions, Vodafone has managed to outgrow its competitors in almost every single one of its markets. If you think about the delivery side.

...a very good example is what iPod has done.  IPod is not simply a product that is somehow thrown over into a retail environment, it is a complete customer experience where Apple has really thought through how to deliver on the promise of a simplified music world across every single dimension.

The third example is Enterprise on developing capabilities.  Everything that Enterprise Rent-A-Car has done has been to figure out what organizational capabilities it can build so that its people every day are customer focused and try to create promoters amongst the customer base. And it's a very specific program that they've put in place. What they've done, though, is sustain that program for a 10-year period, where they've focused on one single measure, which is, Do our customers recommend us to a friend and want to come back? 

And they've driven that up year in and year out. And as a result of that focus on building capabilities, they've been able to outgrow the rental car market hugely in the US. 

So thanks very much for taking the time, and I would love to talk to you more about this.