The Customer Is the Main Thing

Stephen Covey tells us that “the main thing is to keep the main thing the main thing.”

As you can see in this cross section of the EMF, the top of the pyramid is the Customer. They are the main thing. They always have been the main thing and always will be. They are our reason for existence. It is them we exist to serve, not stock price. It is the love of the customer that we want to win. It is their hard-earned money that we seek, to separate from their wallet in increasing quantities into ours, by exchanging equal or greater value through our offerings. The. Customer. Is. The. Main. Thing.

As we make our way down the sides of the pyramid we will notice that the other two areas of focus when we look at the Insights Layer are our Competitors and Forces. With the entire EMF, you will be assessing your insights and their impacts to your customer through three distinct lenses that represent the interdependent functions of your Purpose, People, and Process.

The output from this layer into the subsequent layers will be more humanized tactics that have come from the combination of big data trend analysis, intuition, and your ethnographic (primary) research efforts. Most of you reading this have an embedded and published corporate purpose statement. For those who do not yet have a documented purpose statement for your enterprise, the simplest way to understand the difference between purpose and mission statements is that your purpose guides you while your mission drives you. Your purpose statement handles the “why” about your organization's existence. Mission drills home the “how” you will achieve the vision (the “what”).

Step number one in becoming a human-centric organization is to develop and galvanize your Purpose, Mission, and Vision statements, and to align everyone you bring into your organization around them in an emotionally charged way (i.e., get it into their subconscious). Your corporate purpose statement is not only important for mapping out the customer experience and the customer journey but also crucial for your social business strategy, which we will hit on later.

Since the majority of you reading this likely have a clear understanding of the purpose of your organization, this is where we do a gut check with you on an individual level that allows you—without blame or judgement—to mentally reconnect to that purpose and assess where you could improve in your alignment to that vision. In some cases, you will find that through any number of internal experiences, you cannot find your way back to a complete emotional alignment to the company's purpose. If this is the case, the brutal truth is that it is time you move on. If you cannot put in effort every day in the pursuit of this stated ideal, you are no longer a fit for that organization, and vice-versa; it is time to move on to your next adventure. Life is too short, and work that fills your soul is far too rewarding, to ignore this brutal fact.

Do not sit in an organization and get zombified! Don't rot and please don't take a check each and every pay period for something you don't align with or believe is making a difference in the world. All the money in the world cannot cure that sickness. BRAAAAAIIIINNNSSS!!

Gandhi said to “be the change you wish to see in the world.” What that means to us is that you can make the conscious decision each day to lead from where you are, with or without a specific job title or fancy corner office. You have to be willing to do work that you are not being paid for, and to have effective conversations with whomever you can that will be an asset in you moving your personal vision forward.

Napoleon Hill discussed the habit of going the extra mile in Think and Grow Rich (one of our all-time favorite books). This habit brings the individual to the favorable attention of those who can and will provide opportunities for self-advancement. It also tends to make one indispensable, and it enables him/her to command better compensation for their services.

You will know you are truly aligned with the company's purpose and a champion for the customer when you make decisions throughout the day based on the likelihood of a positive impact to one of two important customer groups. Those two groups consist of the internal customer (fellow employees) and the end-user customer.

Much has been written about regarding the end-user demographic, but all of us realize that the only way to truly be customer-centric in the marketplace is to first ensure that our internal culture is treated as an equally important asset. And guess what. Happy employees are among the best salespeople your organization has. Customers don't trust your brand or CEO half as much as they trust the word-of-mouth recommendation from one of your employees. Happy employees are crucial for the growth and well-being of your organization. They are your first customer!

Buying from some brands can be a religious experience, and yet for the majority of brands, each transaction is just that—a transaction. If your purpose statement is clear and up to date, you should be hiring and firing to that purpose. Who you are hiring and firing (people) is the next lens by which you will be auditing and assessing as we go through the layers of the EMF. People must embody the values of your brand (stated or otherwise) and be bought in to the purpose at an individually meaningful level. Then they must have the required skills and competencies to outperform your competitors in delivering against the promises your brand and marketing makes on a day-in and day-out basis.

People are the glue that makes the EMF work, or the acetone that takes an otherwise brilliant strategy founded in the right research and eats away at its impact with each point of execution. Although you are people powered, your processes should be designed to make sure that you don't become people dependent. Process is the third foundational piece of your puzzle before you begin to dive into the dialogues of the Insight Layer.

At the Insight Layer, you are relishing in brutal truths and insights gained about how and where your current processes are halting/accelerating innovation or optimizing/reducing reliability. The reality is that there are very few processes in any company that cannot be further improved.

In a digital world, you must increase the cycles of review around your processes as part of your quarterly or biannual reviews with the operations team. Why? Because the rate of change to your customer needs, competitive solutions, macroenvironment, and available technologies is so great that your very business model may be at risk.

An organization with digital sense doesn't resist this discipline but instead embraces change as the one true constant. Each process will have a different life cycle, so the value of having a clear understanding of the reason for your existence (purpose) and the relationship you wish to have with your customer (vision) will help you guide your decisions around people (who) and process (how) improvements as you march forward.

We suggest that, in your annual offsite meetings, at a minimum, you sit with your team and extended team leaders and put every person and process—even the sacred ones—on the table and run a game of KCT (Keep, Change, or Trash) on the contents of that table. This is a habit of great organizations that provides insurance against complacency at large.

Complacency and apathy are the top two killers of customer experience. The dangerous idea that you have achieved the peak of your potential already is a cancer that will slowly eat at your organization and market share until one day it is all suddenly gone, never to be regained.

Customers, Competitors, and Forces

We now live in a world where, according to CEB Global research, 57 percent of the buyer's decision in the B2B category has been made before they even contact your sales function. At any given time throughout the buyer's journey you have 12 percent of their mindshare on average.²

Think about that through your own buying habits to help ground you in those statistics more personally. How many places do you look for something online before you center in on the handful of brands you will consider doing business with to make a purchase? On the B2C side, think about how easy and fast it is for you to compare pricing online or on a mobile device for a product you have in your basket, before you decide whether or not to purchase it at that outlet or somewhere else. We both open up a price scanner app whenever we are shopping at brick-and-mortar locations. Don't you?

If you are reading this hardback book right now inside of a Barnes & Noble or local bookstore, we hope you will decide to purchase it there, but we totally understand if you decide to buy it on Amazon as a Prime member or for your Kindle, if the price is more aggressive.

The reality, each of us understands, is that when we have a need and have done our research (broad or narrow) on that purchase, we simply want the most seamless, personalized, and efficient checkout process we can get. We value not only the transaction itself or the product/service being consumed but also our belief and trust in the support system or portal by which we transacted. This is so that, in the event something is wrong or undesirable, we aren't unknowingly creating more work and hassle for ourselves.

Have you ever taken a ride with Uber? No fumbling for payment, no lag in the entry or exit of your ride; you get back your most precious asset, TIME. Digital expectations are raising all expectations.

One of the most basic tips to training a baseline level of digital sense is to have your team members ask themselves how they—as customers—would react to the decision, process, or protocol being instituted. Play devil's advocate. Never perpetuate a process that your internal team would not tolerate if they were customers.

The Customer

“Our challenge is to be in the spaces where our audiences are and understand that they will leave us if we don't work with them and understand their needs.”

—Gavin Heaton³

Despite this well-known fact, there are thousands of organizations that give lip service to implementing the root changes to their operational DNA (Figure 4.2) to effect real change.

As regular air travelers, we are always blown away by how commonplace this is at major airlines. This digital example from American Airlines illustrates how difficult this is without complete organizational alignment from the top down around the customer as the number one asset. The lip service part is below in Figure 4.3 and 4.4.⁴

Figure 4.4 is the page you land on when you click through on “See how we're coming together to create something greater.”⁵

The most important step to evaluating the state of your customer node as you work through the Insights Layer of the EMF (Figure 4.5) is to ensure that you have up-to-date documented personas and journey maps for each of the products/services you offer. You'll also want these for each of the known customer types that you engage with or see as a critical customer class to acquire in the present and near future.

The Importance of Persona and Customer Journey Mapping

Volumes of great material have been written about the importance of persona and journey map development as it relates to effective and efficient experience marketing. Fellow Wiley author and friend Brian Solis has some great resources in his most recent book, X: The Experience Where Business Meets Design. We encourage you to nerd out with Brian in the latter chapters of his book on all of the science and design thinking specifics that surround great journey map development. Also, if you aren't following him yet, do that right now: @briansolis.

The areas to audit at this layer are your detractor pipeline, your Employee Net Promoter Score (eNPS) to Net Promoter Score (NPS) ratio, your journey maps, and how well you have defined and empathized with your core persona targets. One of the problems with just looking at NPS is that as you lose detractors your score actually improves, so you also want to measure the trajectory of your eNPS and make sure that it is not heading in the opposite direction. It is a signal that something is fundamentally wrong within your organizational design and culture, and the first customer (employee) must be as big of a priority as your end-user customer.

For the sake of the pragmatic applications required to get your Insights Layer completed with a solid snapshot of your customer needs and how well you are aligning your major business objectives to them, we suggest you focus on the exercises below as your immediate starting point.

Audience Development Exercise

1. Purpose: Identify key personas and empathize with them
2. Step 1: Stop thinking first about general demographics and think first about the individual human who needs what you sell. What is their problem that you are solving?
3. Step 2: Assign a facilitator and define as a group the top four fictitious customers (personas) in detail that represent your ideal customer set. Give them fictitious names, ethnicities, ages, relationship and/or family statuses, and career profiles. Use the guideline list of persona elements below as a guide if you don't have a formal one.

   Sample Worksheet of Persona Characteristics:

   1. Name: Fictitious name goes here
   2. Gender:
   3. Ethnic background:
   4. Marital Status:
   5. Children:
   6. Occupation:
   7. Education level:
   8. Household Income:
   9. Age:
   10. Websites/Apps most visited:
   11. Hobbies:
   12. Interests/Likes:
   13. Values: (i.e., family, material goods, etc.)
   14. Behaviors: (impatient, driven, multitasker)
   15. Lifestyle: (i.e., foodie, workaholic, etc.)
   16. Who is their boss?:
   17. What problems are they trying to solve?:
4. Step 3: Gather a diverse group of team members (marketing, sales, operations, customer service, executive) that own or have impact on one of the defined customer touch points.
5. Step 4: Hand out a stack of sticky notepads to each person and draw the following chart (Figure 4.6) on a whiteboard or flipchart.

   

6. Step 5: Run through each known touch point (see Figure 4.7) of your customer's journey with your diverse group of leaders and ask the following questions about each touch point.

   Empathy Mapping Group Exercise Questions:

   1. How do they feel?
   2. What are they thinking?
   3. What are they saying and in which medium/channel (on the phone, to a friend, via social media, in store, etc.)?
   4. What are they doing?
      1. Note: Each member of this discussion will write their answer to these questions on their sticky notes, and when everyone is done they will stick them on the board in the appropriate quadrant.
7. Step 6: Depending on which touch points you care most about (i.e., awareness, evaluation, consideration, purchase, etc.), this exercise can take as little as 30 minutes or as long as several hours for each persona. Regardless of the time you give this, don't let lack of time become a reason to procrastinate.

   

Empathizing with your customer sets is the single most important strategy and tactic you can engage in to begin humanizing your business and taking customer experience to a new level. It is also an amazingly efficient and telling way to uncover unknown alignment or lack thereof among your team members and address any inconsistencies or differences of opinion to whom your most valuable personas are and the associated needs they have, which you can help solve.

Look Honestly at Your Competitive Landscape

Now that you have updated your empathic understanding of your core customer segments, and their current and likely near-future needs that you help solve, we need to look honestly across the competitive landscape and score how you stack up overall and align the current baseline to your stated vision of where you are headed.

“The journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step”

—Lao Tzu

Many of you assess market share using a popular framework such as Boston Consulting Group's BCG Matrix or the Gartner Magic Quadrant. We will speak to both tools and how you can use them in this node to create a clear picture of where your opportunity and challenges lie as it relates to increasing your competitive advantage and likelihood of increased success.

As you continue to work through the Insight Layer in this section with your team of internal stakeholders, agency partners, and key partners, you will leverage research and all available data on your business in comparison to your direct competition (Figure 4.8). You will take the audits on detractor pipeline from the work done in your customer node and begin to further map which competitor you lost them to. This allows you to proactively work to discover where the vulnerability lies. You will also identify new competitors or potential competitors in the near future based on leveraging tools such as the Gartner Magic Quadrant⁶ (see Figure 4.9). In some cases, Gartner will have a current-year, published magic quadrant for your industry, and in other cases they will not. In either case, we suggest that you build your own using their framework and compare the two, and discuss the implications and opportunities for you to move from wherever you are to the top right of the quadrant, most relevant to your stated goals and company vision.

According to Gartner the following quadrants are defined as follows:

How does a Gartner Magic Quadrant Work?

A Magic Quadrant provides a graphical competitive positioning of four types of technology providers, in markets where growth is high and provider differentiation is distinct:

1. Leaders execute well against their current vision and are well positioned for tomorrow.
2. Visionaries understand where the market is going or have a vision for changing market rules but do not yet execute well.
3. Niche Players focus successfully on a small segment or are unfocused and do not out-innovate or outperform others.
4. Challengers execute well today or may dominate a large segment but do not demonstrate an understanding of market direction.

The benefit of using the EMF in concert with Gartner's Magic Quadrant is that it will clarify an additional context by which you should rank your competitive advantage looking ahead. That added insight will be based upon your group's qualitative and quantitative assessment of how well you currently execute on the reliability of your customer experience as it relates to your competition and how complete your vision is. This will also show you how to continue innovating your customer experience as a competitive advantage in the coming years.

We will discuss how to operationalize your commitment to reliability and innovation through a social business digital strategy later in this book; until then, the visual in Figure 4.10 will help you contextualize for your C-Suite where both of these commitments play into your present and future market position within the Gartner Magic Quadrant.

Depending on how many lines of business you currently oversee, it may also be in your practice to utilize the BCG Matrix (aka Growth-Share Matrix, as seen in Figure 4.11) as part of your annual assessments and strategic planning.

The EMF will complement this effort as well. It should help you view the investment decisions and future resourcing not only around the immediate impact to the P&L or balance sheet but also as it relates to the near-term future-need-states of your customer. It may also reveal what intellectual property or assets can be repositioned or divested to allow for a doubling down on the most promising question marks, while innovating the customer experience of your cash cows to sustain your priority sources of wealth creation and growth fuel.

We both believe that any framework, including our own, is strongest when it is brilliantly simple and powerfully clear in its communication. However, there is an equally present potential liability or limitation due to that simplicity. The BCG Matrix has great strength in its simple elegance, but it also does not account for a detailed assessment of all the contributing factors of your overall competitive strength, especially in a high-growth market.

Market share is an important factor and leverage point to assess, but in the digital world, where business life cycles have exponentially shortened (see Figure 4.12), complacency and reliance on market share as a strength is the number one blind spot and vulnerability to your sustainability.

The Customer Is the Asset

To reduce this vulnerability in the BCG Matrix, we suggest that the EMF will help you provide through all three layers a more complete picture, as it relates to your market share, brand equity, distribution relationships, logistics/supply chain inefficiencies, product/service line offerings, and customer loyalty/advocacy.

The BCG Matrix, on its own, is most valuable as a reasonable measure of competitive strength in low-growth markets—cash cows and dogs—but it is going to be a much less accurate predictor of your overall health and stability in high-growth, highly fragmented markets. The other limitation of the BCG Matrix (other than the fact that different publishers of it move the boxes around from version to version under the guise of artistic expression, we guess) is the large middle section where many of your offerings/brands or business units may be plotted. There is no inherent tool in the BCG Matrix alone that allows you to know which decision to make as it relates to items in the black hole (Figure 4.13).

Therefore, we believe that as you dive into the competitor node of the EMF, it is important to assess your relative strengths against competition in both the BCG and Gartner frameworks. Each has its value in helping you benchmark where you stand today and where the potential opportunity to leap ahead will be in the future.

Now that you have a good handle on how and where you sit in relationship to your customers in comparison to your direct competitors, it is time to take an intuitive and logical—data-backed—look at the unknown future of outside forces (Figure 4.14) that are possible or likely to have an impact on your customer, your competition, your industry, or society at large. We have bucketed forces into one of five categories and developed some simple questions for the forces exercise to help you get a well-rounded view what is at play around you, so that you can develop a core group of insights worth acting upon.

“Use the Force, Luke!”

As it relates to market forces, you will pull together historical analysis of market trends (bubbles, bursts, election cycle impacts, Fed Funds rates, quantitative easing cycles, employment and productivity data, etc.) and have it at the ready as you ask the group the following directional questions.

1. Do I/we believe that the general stock market value has a direct or inverse relationship to our growth potential?
2. Do we believe that within the next five years we will be in a recession, coming out of one, or in a full-blown bull market?
3. As it relates to our customers and the needs we solve for them, what impact does an uncertain market, growth market, or down market have on their buying potential, loyalty, or psyche?
4. As it relates to our competitors, who is vulnerable or well positioned from a capital to growth trajectory ratio if the market and access to capital changes significantly in the coming years?
5. Is that an opportunity for us to consolidate our industry or be acquired under favorable terms?

The next category of things outside of your control that must be considered are technology forces. In his book, BOLD, Peter Diamandis talks about the six phases that industries go through due to technological forces. It is worth familiarizing yourself with these phases as context because you will want to assess which phase you believe your industry is currently in. You'll also want to assess where current near-term capabilities will be in the coming 2–5 years, especially as you map a plan to stay relevant and in front of your customer's needs with your solution and infrastructure to support them.

The 6 Ds (Phases) as Classified by Peter Diamandis

1. Digitization: The reason why you and your organization need a digital sense is because today, anything can be digitized—represented by ones and zeros—and everything will be digitized in due time. As Marc Andreessen stated in his August 2011 op-ed in The Wall Street Journal, “Software is eating the world.”¹⁰

   If you are still wondering why this is happening and how it can happen, consider that we are now more than 60 years into the computer revolution and more than 20 years into the rise of the modern Internet. We are no longer in the low trajectory of the exponential compounding of Moore's law or Zuck's law; we are at the knee-bend heading into full vertical. Technology that can transform industries overnight through software is now readily and widely available, affordable, and getting cheaper by the second. When things are digitized, they can spread at the speed of light, constrained only by the current speed of our Internet connections.

2. Deception: This is the phase that follows digitization, and in many ways, this is where the masses of society consciously live. This is the phase where most of the exponential growth and compounding goes unnoticed and is mistaken for linear improvements, because our biological evolution happens over millions of years, but we manufacture new complexity in picoseconds.

   The classic exercise to show humanity's bias to think linearly vs. exponentially is The Penny or $1 Million Dollars Exercise: (Figure 4.15)

   1. Step 1: Ask your group to choose between accepting $1 million in cash today or a single (one-cent) penny that doubles every day for the next month.
   2. Step 2: Tell them they have 15 seconds to choose.

   At first blush, most people will do some quick finger math ($0.01 Day 1, $0.02 Day 2, $0.04 Day 3 $0.08 Day 4, $0.16, and so on until you call time.) People will get impatient or fearful of losing out on some percentage of the $1 million in cash by guessing, and based upon their miniscule returns in the first week, they will project a plodder's progress of linear growth on the month and opt to take $1 million today. However, as you can see (in Figure 4.15) they would have left a lot on the table by making that choice.

   Those who chose the penny-doubled option are sweating it a bit at day 20, but as their minds begin to grasp the visible and conspicuous disruption of the compounding, they get very excited. At the same time, when you begin to realize that this holds true for all truths and realities we hold dear today, it can become threatening, scary, and overwhelming.

   What does all this mean to your business reality moving forward? Consider that the smartphone you hold in your hand today has more access to information right now than President George W. Bush had at his total disposal when he entered office in January 2000. The equivalent device at the $1,000 price point in 2023 will have the speed and processing power of a human brain, because of this exponential doubling, and the deception phase is where we wrestle with the notion that something like that is likely or possible when the reality is it is already happening.

3. Disruption: In many ways one of the most overused buzzwords today is disruption, but in the most simple terms, technology forces that cause disruption are the technological breakthroughs or developments that create an entirely new market and destroy an existing one.

   Think about what Airbnb has done for hospitality or Uber has done for consumer expectations and access not to just affordable ride sharing but also to payments at point of sale. The zero-friction payment interface in both of these examples not only has caused massive disruption in their direct industries (hospitality and transportation) but also is disrupting the banking industry and retail payments and merchant industry because of the new consumer expectation and interface they have deployed. Let's not even get into how blockchain technology is disrupting banking, because that's a whole other book!

   You have heard it before, but we live in an exponential era and a digital world. Either disrupt yourself or be disrupted by someone else. Focusing on the customer and the forces shifting their overall expectations outside of your industry are the only ways, in our opinion, to stay ahead of this fact sustainably. It is the one true area to still win competitive advantage.

4. Demonetization: As the disruption takes root in a marketplace, it completely erodes or removes money from the model it disrupted. Skype, and now FB Messenger and the like, demonetized long-distance telephony. Travis paid his way through the University of Kansas by peddling Sprint's $0.10 a minute long distance forever plan! Guess what? It wasn't forever.

   Ubiquitous Wi-Fi access will continue to demonetize wireless carrier plans for fees around SMS, voice, and so on. Napster demonetized the music business. Snapchat and similar applications that allow for personalized consumption and simultaneous production/interaction with media and content may soon demonetize broadcast television in the same way that Netflix demonetized primetime television and the retail movie rental business. Remember Blockbuster Video? Travis may still have some fines to pay them. Let Wayne Huizenga, former CEO of Blockbuster, know that he is truly sorry.

5. Dematerialization: Where demonetization relates to the disappearance of money that was once paid for certain goods and services, dematerialization relates to the disappearance of the actual goods and services themselves.

   For example (Figure 4.16), autonomous driving vehicles at scale will dematerialize the need for traffic cops, auto dealerships, auto lending and ownership in general, and much more. Think about all of the luxuries that existed and were consumed by the upper middle class and wealthy demographic in the 1980s and have now been dematerialized and come standard within the lowest/most basic generation smartphone in an everyman-affordable, pay-as-you-go monthly lease contract.

6. Democratization: The upside of every disruption, however, is that it brings an end to the exponential chain reaction of vanishing returns and opens up an entirely new and abundant marketplace of opportunity that is more widely available for new entrants to solve problems with new innovations.

   In the world ahead, everything from money, health records, and title/ownership records to corporate capitalization tables can exist in a distributed ledger, such as blockchain, with no need for intermediaries or trust agents; the opportunity is endless. In a world where cars drive for us, we will think of new opportunities to fill our time. In a world where we use mobile devices—or merge with our devices—as if it was our personal remote control, to call on-demand anything and everything, where are you positioned as a company and organization? This world is not off into the 50–100 year future. This is the next 5–15 years. The most exciting and disruptive moments in human history are happening now through 2030.

   Lastly, there are also technology forces that have nothing to do with the future and everything to do with the past, that must be navigated as you attempt to become a customer-centric digital organization. Those forces are the legacy technology systems and disparate incentives between your IT and marketing/sales functions. We highly recommend you also pick up and read The Inevitable: Understanding the 12 Technological Forces That Will Shape Our Future by Kevin Kelly as a great supplemental guide to the questions below.

Questions to Assess Technological Forces

The high-level questions to ask your team to assess the technological forces that are likely to impact your business are below and give you a starting point to prioritize your plan of attack:

1. What can we do to better meet the increased frictionless expectations that our customers have about transacting with any company because of outside disruptions from Uber, Amazon, and so on to the user interface and experience of purchasing a product or service?
2. What are we doing to think of ourselves as a technology and media company, regardless of our core offering, so that we can deepen the engagement and relationship we have within our customer's mindshare?
3. What are the truths that we hold about ourselves that are not vulnerable to disruption?
4. What new cultural shift, technology, or consumer access point would make those truths and sacred cows go away?
5. Why wouldn't we endeavor right now to create them before they get created by someone else?
6. What legacy technology systems do we rely on that can or are inhibiting our ability to seamlessly align around customer experience?
7. Do we have a documented and widely known and drilled set of protocols in the event of an act of terror, direct cyber attack, or indirect cyber attack against one of our major partners that will secure the assets and data of our employees, customers, and partners?

   

   

The remaining forces include acts of God, cultural, and legislative forces that are outside of your control (sometimes even if you own and fund the political lobby). As you address these in your EMF planning, the following questions are good high-level catalysts to stir up your brainstorm.

Acts of God Questions

1. Do we have an up-to-date disaster and recovery plan documented in place for our employees and our customers?
2. Do we have a marketing and promotional plan and communication strategy to respond in real time to natural disasters that communicates an on-message proactive response to our employees and customers?
3. Do we have a robust set of supporting partners or internal programs to help our people through emotionally trying times or life events and have we empowered HR to create and invest in this strategy for when bad things happen to our good people and customers?

Cultural Forces Questions

1. Does our internal culture, office esthetic, policy, and procedure design meet the needs and desires of tomorrow's workforce and talent?
2. Is our compensation model clear, equitable, and fun? Do our incentive structures line up to us achieving our major business objectives while simultaneously causing customer-centric decision-making across departments?
3. Are we at risk of having talent poached by direct competitors? If so, what postmortems have we run to assess where we can shore up vulnerability? What one change could we make in this coming quarter to mitigate future losses immediately?
4. How aligned are the growth trajectories of our eNPS scores to our customer NPS scores? Are we focused on giving our first customer (the employee) the attention and clarity of purpose they need and deserve?
5. If our culture is one of our greatest assets, how are we leveraging this story to be told through our marketing and communications plans as a key differentiator? Are we doubling down on this or deprioritizing?

Legislative Forces Questions

1. What have election cycles (lame duck periods and media inventory costs) done to our projections of conversion rate, cost per lead, length of sales cycle, and so on in the past? What sensitivity analysis and assumptions are we making about this next few years as we look forward?
2. Are we investing appropriately in political capital locally, regionally, and nationally depending on our business footprint? Are we inefficient or inactive in this regard? Are we missing an opportunity?
3. If our industry gets deregulated (or regulated) in the coming few years, does our strategy have a parallel plan in place to capitalize on this type of shift and either preserve our core business and customer relationships or take market share away from our competition?
4. Will legislation that is reactive to acts of terror, acts of God, or shift in political control cause us an increased cost burden to maintain compliance? And what will our plan be to maintain our customer relationships on smaller budgets as we meet any of these new requirements?

Congratulations! You have now arrived at the end of the Insights Layer and now have a couple of dozen questions from each node that you can formalize a meaningful discussion within your team immediately to begin building your insights into a social business strategy with humanized tactics. As you contemplate this chapter, you may also come to the conclusion that your very business model is at risk of rapidly becoming obsolete.

Business model is best defined simply as “how you make money sustainably to survive and grow.” As you think through the customer needs, the competitive landscape, and the various forces described previously, you may come to the conclusion that you need a new vision and business model all together. As G.I. Joe said, “Knowing is half the battle!”

Takeaways from the Insight Layer

• The major insights you will gain come from taking a deep look at the needs of your customer, your current and attainable near-term position in the competitive landscape, and the forces outside of your control.
• In a digital world there are six phases of the business life cycle: Digitization, Deception, Demonetization, Disruption, Dematerialization, and Democratization, which then leads to a remonetization.
• You must assess the insights, opportunities, threats, strengths, and vulnerabilities through both the internal customer (employee) lens and the external customer (market).

After the exercises in this chapter you may come to the conclusion that your very business model is on the near-term trajectory to obsolescence. In any event it is a wise practice to use EMF to disrupt yourself and find new ways to win the customer relationship before someone else does.