It’s time business leaders get obsessed about their customers

In any business, pulling together is how you win externally. No business wins internally - the customer and the competition are outside.

Too often, however, each business function wants to maximise its impact without regard for the effect on others. Department heads may focus on their own customer-service targets with a blinkered view that ignores the true value of collaboration. When you make the step up to a seat in the boardroom, though, this must be left at the door. Any friction fuelling departmental silos is certain to create a business that won’t deliver against its customers’ unmet needs.

I’m pleased to say that has not been my own personal experience. Having been the CFO at Apogee, I moved away for a period to work at its parent company HP, before returning as CEO. But I had never been consumed by the need to solely fight the corner of the finance function. My role as CFO has given me a unique view of the business I have come back to steer - but this was because I was clear as CFO that spreadsheets and finance software are not the business, just a representation of it. Not everything comes with an ROI attached.

Focusing on customers’ aims and obstacles

Any business should obsessively focus on its customers’ needs – their aims and the obstacles they face in trying to achieve them. Then, they must consider how they can help remove those obstacles. Many organisations fail to achieve their potential, however, because employees don’t fully appreciate what their colleagues are also doing to achieve the same goal. They head roughly in the same direction, but separately and by different routes, which is not a winning strategy.

Some functions may believe they have no role at all in this, especially if they have no direct contact with customers. The reality is that everyone in a business is just a touchpoint away from the customer and is accountable. Everyone can act decisively to help deliver customer-first outcomes.

For example, the facilities management team should ensure the office or workplace is attractive and creates a good environment for everyone – customers as well as colleagues. Similarly, the accounts payable function should help everyone else in the business by ensuring they pay suppliers on time to guarantee goods arrive and customers are served.

The removal of siloed practices and an external focus is essential if the whole organisation is to achieve that critical level of operational excellence that puts customers first and which customers cannot fail to notice.

The need to know not just customers, but the markets they serve, is mandatory – especially in IT. Business requirements and workflows are becoming more complex. To be an effective partner, you need to think about how you help overcome the difficulties and bottlenecks that prevent your customer from serving the full needs of their customers.

Proactively understanding unmet needs

In managed print or IT, for instance, we must think about the significant changes that lie ahead for customers, looking beyond current applications and examining the broader context of business evolution.

It would be easy, for example, to advise customers to rush into AI applications as quickly as possible so they can maintain competitiveness. But many of those applications will not meet the real needs of customers. The role of a managed IT provider is to understand how any solution meets the customer’s unmet needs.

The advance of digitalisation in almost all industries and sectors demands we actively conceptualise what the future looks like for each customer in terms of managed IT services and solutions. That may well involve AI, but AI should be a tool to deliver what is best for the unique requirements of the customer’s business, not an end to itself.

It is so important for any business to ensure everyone pulls together on this to ensure the organisation isn’t looking inwards, unaware of how customers’ needs are changing. That might involve removing stubborn internal barriers – many of them cultural – so everyone is devoted to operational excellence, pooling their expertise for maximum delivery. At Apogee, we are focused on four key behaviours that everyone in the organisation rallies around: customer first, accountability, we win externally, and operational excellence. This is the essence of how we can deliver against our customers’ unmet needs.

Sustainable business growth at a time of rapid change dictates that everyone pulls together in the same direction, serving the future needs of customers and their customers alike.

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