Are you really customer centric? Perform the broken laptop test

“Hey, we are customer centric. We invested in customer relationship management software, trained our frontline employee staff, and so on”. It’s a comment we often get when talking with organizations. But is all of this sufficient to be customer-centric? Well, not at all.

Sooooo… How can you know whether you’re customer centric or not? We propose the broken laptop test. The test is actually quite easy. Imagine the following situation:

Two computers break down at exactly the same point in time. One is from a frontline employee that is serving customers. The frontline employee really needs his or her laptop to serve customers well, and as a result, customers might be dissatisfied because they have to wait longer for their service than expected. The other one… Is from the CEO. Whose laptop will be fixed first?

In most organizations, the IT department will give preferential treatment to the CEO’s laptop. But just think about it… Most of the time the CEO doesn’t really need his or her laptop, because of being in meetings, having access to a tablet, and so on. And in the meantime, time is ticking for the frontline employee. Every minute the laptop is not fixed, results in more dissatisfied customers.

In a customer-centric organization, the frontline employee’s laptop is fixed first, as everyone within the organization, including the IT department, just knows that not fixing this laptop first might result in bad customer experiences. In the end, everyone is responsible for the customer experience!

What about your organization? Whose laptop will be fixed first?