Customer-Centricity is often misunderstood. There is a fine line between on the one hand “doing what your customers want you to do”, and so not achieving the goals of the business, (a common misconception of customer-centricity),  and on the other hand being driven entirely by what the business wants, at the expense of the customers (which is the behaviour most companies naturally default to). Somewhere in the middle is what is right for each particular business.

The reality is that it’s all about balance. I usually think of this as a triangle. On the three points of the triangle are

• sales focus (i.e. the needs of the company),
• customer focus (i.e. the needs of the customers), and
• feasibility focus (i.e. being driven by systems and operations).

Where a company places the emphasis says a lot about how customer-centric they are.

Some companies, such as Ryanair, will be heavily weighted towards sales focus, rather than customer focus. Ryanair may or may not be measuring the Customer Experience, but they have made a business decision that their place in the market is to win customers who are driven by cost rather than experience.

For companies such as British Airways, however, it’s a different matter. Their proposition is very much focussed on the Customer Experience, and so they should be focussed not only on sales, but on the customer.

But the problem doesn’t end there. Once the ‘proposition triangle’ is decided – which represents the strategy of what the proposition SHOULD look like, there’s the tricky task of actually making it happen. For companies such as British Airways, with a proposition centred around good Customer Experiences, it is critical that their proposition is backed up by reality. Unfortunately, this is where many companies let themselves down.

The two key questions to ask are:

1. If you want a good customer experience, are you measuring all the Customer Experience outcomes you want to see? Do you really have the whole picture? Even the hard to measure aspects like multi-channel experience and customer engagement? Are the measures the right ones for the job in each case to produce accurate results? Do they come at the right time?
2. Are customer-facing channels run in such a way that good customer experiences are delivered? Are people’s KPIs aligned to Customer Experience measures? Are project processes supporting or undermining good customer experiences?

Measurement is a key part of this. Many companies claim to be customer-centric, but only measure very few aspects of the customer experience, so really have no way of knowing whether they are or not.

For many companies, they might think they are customer-centric, but their KPIs are all focussed entirely on sales rather than Customer Experience, so they end up getting exactly what they are rewarding – the drive for short term sales keeps undermining the building of good customer experiences, so they never truly meet their goals of being more customer-centric. Many companies get the balance wrong, and are operationally and strategically focussed on their own aims as a company, rather than the needs of their customer, and it shows in the experiences they produce.

Being customer-centric is about understanding the proposition, and to what degree it depends on good customer experience, and then creating strategies focussed on exactly how customers should experience their interactions with the company. To be effective, this needs to be backed up with the systems and processes to deliver good customer experiences, and the right measures to keep track of process towards the goals.

When the ‘strategy’ triangle matches the ‘actual’ triangle, based on accurate Customer Experince measures, then the job is done, and the company is exactly as customer-centric as it needs to be. Until the strategy needs tweaking, that is.

One of the most commonly-stated goals of a customer-centric company is to put the customer at the heart of everything the company does, especially in customer channels. However, in reality many companies find this a challenge because they lack the methods to keep the customer’s needs front-of-mind when the pressures of implementation come thick and fast.

Page Goals are a way to operationalize Customer-Centric strategy in the web channel.

Lost benefits
Once the process of improving the website kicks off, customer-centric blueprints and wireframes are produced, which have the intention of producing major performance improvements to the website. However, many of these improvements will never see the light of day. In a surprisingly high number of web projects, the Customer Experience improvements don’t seem to make it through the production cycle.

So what’s going wrong in these cases? The strategy is right, the blueprint is right, but the benefits are being lost in the process between concept and go-live.

This is where Page Goals step in.

Page Goals is a methodology for making sure that a web page meets the goals it is supposed to meet, and for protecting these goals as it moves through the production process. I began developing the methodology as an Information Architect just over 10 years ago, and have continued to develop it as I’ve moved into Customer-Centric strategy, and incorporated a variety of  tricks and techniques I’ve picked up along the way.

Conflicting goals
The Page Goals methodology is based around the idea that each page is trying to achieve a range of goals which are often conflicting. An effective webpage achieves balance between these goals, and it is the role of the website improvement project to maintain these goals over the course of the project, but this can be difficult. Some of these goals originate far away from the project (Corporate Strategy), and in particular, some of them originate from the Customer, who is not present.

The strongest influence on the project is usually the project stakeholders, who may or may not hold these business and customer needs close. By defining the goals of the page early on, when the user insight and corporate strategy have been balanced to produce the solution that works best for both, the inevitable twists and turns of implementation can be navigated without undoing the benefits of the project.

An example
An example might help illustrate this. I’m sure you will be familiar with some web pages which are full or promotions – banners everywhere, every part of the page ‘shouting’ at the customer, with all kinds of conflicting messages. This is a classic example of a conflicted page, with unclear page goals.
I’ve sat in many meetings in various companies negotiating how to keep the stakeholder happy whilst also making the page more effective. In a stakeholder-centric environment, the discussion can go something like this …

The person responsible for the Customer Experience:
- “The customer is being confused by this barrage of ‘shouting’ banners and colour – can we focus on just a few things we want this page to achieve?”

To which the stakeholders in the room will reply:
- “We need this page to drive sales to my part of the business”
- “We need this page to drive sales to _my_ part of the business”
- “Yes, but we also need to drive sales to _my_ part of the business”
- …. Etc.

And so the page ends up turning out very much like the meeting might turn out – a tug of war, with the overall objectives of the business being lost in the process.

Page Goals provide a set of processes for maintaining strategic direction and customer focus throughout the lifetime of a web project, not just when the Customer Experience team are involved. Once the site is complete, they can then be used for measurement of the website against its original goals.

There must be a more effective way of managing the web channel to deliver on strategic goals, and the Page Goals methodology provides this more results-focused way of managing websites.