Customer orientation programme: Keys to the future

How does a company succeed in becoming more customer-oriented, and how can service orientation be lived? The programme “Schlüssel für die Zukunft” gives a practical answer: it makes customer and service orientation in the organisation actively and pragmatically workable.

The structured and proven approach creates awareness in the company of the quality of service delivery, from the point of view of internal and external customers.

The programme brings about a change of perspective. It develops the attitude that everyone is both customer and supplier. This also applies to working with internal stakeholders, above all with colleagues.

All those involved are enabled to identify quality and performance gaps, to work on them with measurable success and to close them.

The concept consists of three flexibly usable modules. They are introduced one after the other and, in virtual or in-person workshops, pave the way to a customer-oriented organisational culture.

If customer orientation towards external and internal stakeholders is strengthened, long-term and stable customer and employee relationships emerge. They secure the company’s success.

The following chapters describe the areas in which the programme takes effect, the tools it works with, why the approach is effective and how it is implemented in practice.

The programme takes effect in three areas. The first is customer orientation internally and externally. Carrying out the three modules sharpens employees’ awareness of internal and external customer expectations. This creates the conditions for optimally functioning internal and external customer-supplier relationships.

The concept interlinks theory and practice, because it is rolled out using concrete services from day-to-day business. While learning the method, employees already identify and close concrete quality and performance gaps and thus increase the satisfaction of internal and external customers.

The second area is the development and retention of employees. All those involved are enabled to recognise quality and performance gaps and remedy them measurably. This increases employees’ identification with their role and with the company, and thus service orientation in the team.

Added to this are multipliers. Where managers are heavily loaded, selected people learn the method and grow into active supporters of the managers. This anchors the know-how in the company and secures the application of the method in the medium and long term.

The third area is the organisational networking of system intelligence. The programme can be applied to the service portfolio of individual employees, teams, business units or the entire organisation. It is flexibly scalable and can also be coordinated entirely via digital channels.

Its interdisciplinary character strengthens networking across units. Historically grown silos can be irritated. Experience shows that reflecting on one’s own role as supplier and as customer unlocks potential to use system intelligence across specialist departments.

The programme works with three tools that build on one another. With the first, “taking customer expectations seriously”, those involved adopt the perspective of internal and external customers and analyse customer-supplier relationships.

With the second, “understanding customer expectations”, quality and performance gaps are identified from the customer’s point of view and awareness of customer expectations is sharpened. With the third, “meeting customer expectations”, the identified gaps are closed systematically and in a solution-oriented way with measurable success.

Tool 1 leads in four steps to the attitude on which everything else builds. In the first step, customer-supplier relationships are identified. The guiding question is who the internal and external customers are.

In the second step, the key interfaces are identified. The question clarified is which points of reference and interfaces exist with internal and external customers.

In the third step, those involved adopt the customer’s perspective. They ask how they open up to their customers and their expectations.

The fourth step is solution-oriented thinking. Here the question is how the conditions are created for improving customer-supplier relationships permanently.

The aim of this tool is to create awareness of internal and external customer expectations and to address customer orientation as a matter of attitude.

Tool 2 translates the attitude into a close look at one’s own performance. It comprises five steps. It starts with the functional task: what is the raison d’être of the function under consideration?

In the second step, the services are determined. The question is which services are provided that contribute to customers’ requirements and needs. In the third step, customer expectations are described: what do internal and external customers expect of these services?

In the fourth step, customer requirements are defined from these. It is clarified which measurable requirements can be derived from the respective customer expectations. In the fifth step, the performance gaps are identified. It is checked to what extent the service provided meets expectations.

The aim of tool 2 is to turn interfaces into seamless connections and to arrive at functioning internal and external customer-supplier relationships.

Tool 3 offers a structured approach to closing the performance gaps. It too has five steps. First, the performance gap is described: facts and effects are determined and goals are set.

Then the causes are established. To do this, possible causes are collected, data is compiled and the main causes are determined. In the third step, solutions are sought: solution ideas are developed and sorted by feasibility.

In the fourth step, the selected solutions are implemented and rolled out. In the fifth step, the successes are measured, using the measuring points identified in the first step. This closes the circle from the described gap to a demonstrable result.

Why is this approach effective? The answer lies in the understanding of organisation. transformis understands organisations as complex social systems that provide solutions to problems in their environment.

By drawing a boundary, an organisation creates an internal space in order to ensure stable output despite external influences. This results in highly selective perception, and relevant changes are often not recognised early enough.

Organisations must reduce complexity in their observation. From the multitude of environments, which include customers, suppliers, competitors, employees, banks, the city or the internet, they select the relevant ones. This happens through frameworks of observation and evaluation and is necessary in order to remain able to act.

The established routines, however, are geared to confirming the internal ideas about the environments and filtering out divergent impulses. An organisation sees what it sees, and as a rule it does not see that it does not see what it does not see.

Appropriate leadership therefore ensures the right amount of impulses flowing into organisational decision-making processes. Consulting is understood as a deliberate decision to counteract the self-referentiality of organisations.

This is where the programme comes in. Anyone who adopts the perspective of internal and external customers and translates their expectations into measurable requirements brings impulses into the organisation that its routines would otherwise filter out.

Everything that today is assigned to the concept of organisational and corporate culture has an enormously strong influence on the coordination of behaviour in organisations. It eludes direct, explicit influence, however. We are talking about undecidable decision premises.

They include basic convictions, values, beliefs shared as a matter of course, and ritual patterns of communication and behaviour. Indirectly, this also includes organisationally anchored customer orientation.

Customer orientation involves the regular, systematic recording and analysis of customers’ wishes, needs and expectations, and acting on them. If it is lived both towards external stakeholders and towards internal customers, colleagues, long-term, stable and economically sound relationships emerge.

Stable customer relationships internally and externally secure the company’s success and bind employees to the organisation.

Some core theses apply to culture. Culture is the complex of undecidable decision premises. These premises strongly influence the coordination of behaviour and elude direct influence. They take shape and change as collectively reproduced patterns emerge through the repeated experience of very specific standards.

Key players in particular influence these patterns through repeatedly displayed behaviour. Changes to the premises therefore cannot be set in motion simply by talking about them. In transformis’ understanding, culture change is called for when the existing corporate culture limits organisational performance.

Christina Grubendorfer (2016) understands culture, in essence, as the set of rules of the game of a social system that are taken for granted and applied, and only enter awareness when they are broken.

The structure of an organisation results from formality, that is, the decidable, formal decision premises, and from corporate culture, the undecidable, cultural premises. What is undecidable shows itself in culture, and what shows itself as culture is not decidable.

Undecidable decision premises are like the proverbial elephant in the room: everyone sees it, but it is not addressed. The premises are decided, but not decidable. One can speak of the corporate culture if what is meant is a complex of expectations that does not have to be free of contradictions in order to take effect.

A corporate culture is strong when decisions are strongly influenced by cultural premises. This applies particularly where fewer formal premises prevail, for example in family businesses.

Corporate culture cannot be changed by order, but it can be influenced. It is advisable for leadership first to answer the question of which organisational challenges have to be overcome in order to achieve the strategic goals. This is followed by the question of how supportive or obstructive the dynamics of the culture currently lived are.

For intervention, the rule is: it is always the formal structure that is worked on, not the culture. Anyone who wants to change corporate culture plays it indirectly, “off the cushion”. What is changed are decidable decision premises such as programmes, communication channels or people.

The culture comments on these changes. How it does so cannot be predicted. A situational approach should therefore be chosen, in which the effects of each intervention at the cultural level are observed so that the next step can be thought through afresh.

In this sense, “Schlüssel für die Zukunft” is a pragmatic anchor for effectively paving the way for cultural change in the organisation. The programme changes how services are described, expectations are gathered and gaps are worked on, and thus the communication channels in which customer orientation shows itself.

An implementation concept from practice follows four stages. It begins with the launch of the programme. This is followed by the workshops on tool 1 and tool 2. In them, awareness of internal and external customer expectations is created, and interfaces become seamless connections.

These are followed by validation meetings in which the identified performance gaps are prioritised. The fourth stage is tool 3: the prioritised gaps are closed using the structured approach, and customer expectations are met.

Material created from practice for practice is available for implementation. Introductory videos on each tool make the content tangible for participants and give internal implementers orientation.

Detailed working documents describe the approach and contain concrete didactic support for facilitators and for the programme’s multipliers.

Presentation materials enable independent implementation. The templates for kick-off events and specific working meetings can be used flexibly, in face-to-face events as well as via digital channels.

Feedback from participants shows what the programme changes in everyday work. An employee from the marketing department of a municipal utility found it interesting to see how understanding was sharpened that those involved depend on one another and that services can only be delivered by working together.

A team leader from the IT department of a network operator reported that the workshop had been well received. The decisive factor was that it was not only about the manager’s assessment and that the whole team had taken part. As a result, the expert knowledge in the team had become transparent.