About

COURSE OBJECTIVE
Develop a roadmap for your organisation to transform into a profitable customer centric organisation

“If you want to be challenged join me on this course. If you’re really serious about changing the culture and focus of your organisation you’ll get more than your money’s worth. We’ll look at what being customer-centric really means and what it doesn’t. Why there are so many New Zealand companies that might say they are and their customers will attest they’re not. We’ll also look at the need for rethinking how you do business from top to bottom and how you can achieve a win-win situation for your firm, your customers and most importantly your shareholders. And by doing so you’ll create a truly sustainable competitive advantage that will be almost impossible to beat.” - Tom Agee

Is your organisation a truly customer centric organisation?

The business world has long identified customer service as a crucial differentiator for long term sustainable success. However, excellent customer service goes beyond maintaining a pleasant level of service at the front line or just keeping customers satisfied.

Customer centricity is an all-encompassing approach that requires an organisation to reorient their entire operating model around the customer – which means organisations may even have to make dramatic internal organisation changes and evolve from keeping customers satisfied to impressing customers.
 
Developing a Customer Centric Organisation is a practical course that examines and assesses the big picture of customer centricity whilst helping you to develop the capability to become more customer centric. You will emerge from the course with valuable insights and perspectives in leveraging a customer centric strategy to increase your profitability in the long term.

7 GREAT REASONS TO ATTEND
1. Understand why and how customer centricity is more important than customer satisfaction
2. Increase business opportunities and profitability with customer centric strategy
3. Establish how a customer-centric strategy can increase profitability and shareholder value?
4. Find out how you can optimise customer-centric systems and processes cost effectively
5. Identify who your internal and external customers are and make necessary organisational changes to improve the situation
6. Overcome the disconnection between the concept of customer-centricity and financial accounting system
7. Gain buy-in from top management

Outline

Day One

Stepping Up to Customer-Centrics
• What is a customer-centric organisation?
• From pushing products to winning customers – relationship marketing
• What’s in it for you? What’s in it for the customer?
• Assessing how customer-centric your organisation is
• Identifying cultural changes necessary to ensure customer focus

Designing a Customer-Centric Organisation
A framework for analysing customer-centric marketing.
• Re-orienting the entire operating model around the customer
• Understanding the four stages of customer focus
• Building competitive advantage with “Wow” factors that customers value
• Developing systems, metrics and processes to monitor the consistency and success of its customer-centric strategy

Leveraging a Customer-Centric Strategy to Increase Profitability
• Aligning the operating model with a defined and quantified customer segmentation strategy – not all customers are equal
• How can a customer-centric strategy increase profitability and shareholder value?
• Customer retention strategy: increasing customer loyalty and ROI
• Understanding and calculating Customer Lifetime Value

Making Internal Organisational Changes: Walking the Talk
• The role of external customers, employees and partners
• Turning the organisational chart on its head
• “Moments of truth” that recreate your brand thousands of times a day
• Rethinking reward systems in customer-centric organisations
• The vital role of HR in building a customer-centric organisation

Day Two

Building Blocks of a Customer-Centric Organisation
• Customer experience as a strategic management tool.
• Making systems and processes more customer friendly whilst minimising costs and adding value
• Collaborating across organisational silos: across functions, product & service lines; integrating marketing and non-marketing functions
• Transforming an existing organisation using the sequential approach

Using the Full Power of Customer Insight
• Analysing the seven dimensions of your customers’ buying behaviour.
• Using research and technology to gather vital data
• Tailoring your service levels, pricing, and product development to better meet customer needs and ultimately profitability
• Achieving more efficient deployment of firm-wide resources

Measuring and Managing Customer-Centricity
• Customer profitability as a strategic management tool
• Key metrics in customer-centric organisations that would stand up to an external audit
• The disconnection between the concept of customer-centricity and financial accounting system - soft vs. hard measures
• “The Service-Profit Chain” and “Zero Defections” – getting bean counters on board

Avoiding Implementation Pitfalls
• Understanding that this is neither simply a marketing initiative nor a quick fix for poor customer ratings and or sagging sales
• Getting the CEO and top management on board from the start and are personally committed to implementing its strategies
• Developing cross functional teams to foster communication, co-ordination and cooperation
• Ensuring that staff at all levels “own” the programme and take responsibility for its success
• Never promising staff or customers anything you cannot deliver on
• Measuring the right things, i.e. both soft and hard measures to track results over time

Facilitator

Tom Agee, Senior Lecturer, Dept of Marketing, University of Auckland

Tom immigrated to New Zealand in 1974 from the United States where he was founding partner in a successful advertising agency in Richmond, Virginia after 15 years in public relations and advertising, having won awards for both.  In New Zealand he was group marketing manager for New Zealand’s largest media conglomerate and later returned to advertising as senior account director at one of New Zealand’s oldest and largest advertising agencies (now FCB) serving major New Zealand brands, e.g. AHI, NZI, Coldrex, Choysa, Cerebos Greggs.

            In 1985, he joined the Auckland Institute of Technology (then ATI), as lecturer in Marketing. In 1992 became Head of the School of Marketing, Advertising and Tourism where he established New Zealand’s first degree in Advertising, and later in Advertising Creativity.             

In 1994 he received his MPhil (Marketing) with honours from The University of Auckland where he become a senior lecturer in the Department of Marketing and established New Zealand’s first course in Marketing Communications. He has taught on undergraduate, masters, post graduate executive programmes.

            His academic research is in the area of Advertising Effectiveness.  His master’s thesis was “The Effect of Television Clutter on Advertising Recall”. His PhD research on the effectiveness of infomercials as a form of direct response television has appeared in both the American Journal Advertising Research and Journal of Consumer Research.

A prolific writer, his column “One Consumer’s Opinion” was a popular feature of Marketing Magazine for 20 years until a change of publishers in 2009. He co-authored the NZ Marketing Resource and Case Studies Book  published in 1996 and his articles have appeared in the New Zealand Listener and Ad Media magazines as well as the Commerce Commission’s Compliance publication.  In 2011, his case studies on NZ Consumer and Telecom XT will appear in McGraw-Hill’s Consumer Behaviour – Implications for Marketing Strategy 5^th Edition.

            He has been a consultant to major New Zealand firms and Government Departments including: Mobil, NZ Sugar, Lion Breweries, TVNZ and Public Trust, as well as an expert witness on advertising related cases for Ministry of Health, Commerce Commission and Telecom.

            He is a popular conference and seminar speaker as well as in-house trainer whose clients have included: National Bank, Auckland District Law Society, Gen-i (Telecom), NZ Inland Revenue, Housing NZ, Waitakere City Council, Counties Manukau District Health Board, Pfizer, Merck Sharp & Dohme, Visique Optometrists, Carpet Court, Fiji Visitors Bureau and the NZ Association of Advertisers.

            In 1994 he became the fourth person to be inducted into the New Zealand Marketing Hall of Fame, for his contribution to the profession over two decades.

Tom Agee is also facilitating:

• Creating an Effective Strategic Communications Plan
• Marketing Essentials

In-house Training