Too often, companies go about their innovation in relatively narrow channels. Now, imagine an organization in which everyone shares the stories of the successes for customers. These businesses have a much stronger proclivity for synthesizing ideas in order to combine and connect improvements for even greater gains in new areas of the organization. Leveraging great stories about value-added ideas for customers is a key component of the Customer 3D system.

Highly customer-centered organizations have a campfire mentality. The campfire, of course, has always been recognized as the traditional place to share stories. In modern organizations, however, telling customer success stories helps to spread the behaviors that created the good ideas. What results is a shared passion for helping customers which manifests itself in these ways:

• Empowerment based on an expanded view by all employees of the types of behaviors that are “allowable” in thinking like a customer. Praise for great work simply reinforces a wider, more positive perception of what other employees should be doing.
• Specific knowledge so that other employees do not have to “re-invent the wheel.” If a team of employees, for example, did extensive research on a new idea for customers, stories about how they accomplished the success will help to document these new learning levels.
• Cohesion: Customer 3D companies know how to collaborate across departmental boundaries on behalf of their customers. There is no need for silo-busting in companies with a strong sense of storytelling.

The great work that you and your team has done for your customers is not finished until you have shared your approach and how successful it was with the other employees throughout the organization. Success builds on other successes, leaving a stronger company, capable of expanding the benefits of customer closeness even further.

It is a focus on high performance without compromise, focused on the transformation from weak to strong. Companies are finally realizing that if they are going to outperform for their customers, they need a capacity-building program for their entire organization. Like Cross Fit, they train for principles rather than events.

Every organization has a perception of what it can do for the customer, just as one person might be capable of bench-press a 100-pound load, while another can lift 180 pounds. The problem occurs when we overload the system. When that happens, individuals may be deficient or the system does not work properly in total. In a conventional environment you are able to handle a specific load and your gear your behaviors to that capability. Beyond that level, you answers change to “I can’t do that” or “Our rules do not allow that” because that is the mindset the organization expects to perform to for the customer. Traditional organizations are limited in what they can do — somewhere between a couch potato and a casual or “weekend” athlete. 3D organizations are ready to meet any challenges necessary to make their customers successful.

The Customer3D system, on the other hand, increases capacity. It strengthens an organization to handle more extensive opportunities than it previously thought possible and to grow that capacity even further each time a new threshold is reached. It expands to create a buffer capacity, built for better flexibility and ready for new ideas to add value to customers. It is balanced and ready to perform in a much higher, more proactive dimension. It is a fitness program that allows your organization to handle more and work harder for your customers—to be optimal.

Every customer encounter does not need a highly intensive performance, but exceptional organizations build in the capacity anyway. When Customer 3D capabilities are in place, employees are prepared to deliver exceptional customer-centered performance when needed. They can draw on a confidence and reserve that 1D organizations simply cannot understand. It is very much a difference-maker.

The system works because employees in an organization with enthusiasm realize that they don’t have to implement new ideas all by themselves. Why? It happens because there is a feeling of creative energy that resonates. It is a solution to any tension between groups or functions with the organization because it is grounded in a non-confrontational behaviors that result in intensity, without a feeling of winning or losing.

Enthusiasm means that employees are fully present and that they know where they are going. They are aligned around a customer focus which is unlike any degree which a product-centered company exhibits. Their goal is not having something (money, possessions, etc.) but doing something meaningful. And when this doing is for someone else—the customer—it is much more satisfying and they become more effective. The enjoyment that employees have in the work they do or the product they sell expands to a new dimension built around the new goal of fully working for the customer.

Ralph Waldo Emerson famously said, “Nothing great has ever been achieved without enthusiasm.” One of the unexpected byproducts of the Customer 3D system of becoming customer-centered is the beautiful increase in enthusiasm which it creates across the business. That is because it is generated by activities that engage employees with others rather than passively carrying out a transaction for or about a product. It is a new perspective, even though making and shipping products is still involved, which is far different from traditional business models. Employees are empowered because they have a new purpose.

1. It is supplier-centric. The only goal is product sales at any cost.
2. It is manipulative. It attempts to lure customers into stores with a bait-and-switch scheme.
3. It has no recognition of whether the customers receiving the so-called bargains have every shopped at their stores before or intend to shop there in the future.
4. It presents a deceptive view of value. Lowering costs on a small number of items does not deliver real value.
5. It says, “Attack our store, we don’t have to answer questions, and when you want to pay us, we will take your money at the cash register.”
6. It is copy-cat. Companies participate primarily because others are involved. It is a desperate attempt not to outperform, but simply to stay even with the competition.

The term Black Friday is now accepted as the day in which retailers turn a profit on the year or “go into the black.” However, the origins of the term range from descriptions of the shopping rush and resulting traffic jams to a reference to worker absenteeism on this day from as early as the 1950’s. There is almost nothing appealing about the process. It has no regard for the welfare of company employees who are forced to work ridiculous hours and, of course, if some cases, it results in violence of shoppers against one another. This day represents the lowest point of the year for companies in forgetting their customers and resorting to gimmicks based on selling more products.

Black Friday techniques are built on short-term tactics that primarily benefit the seller. A customer-centered mindset thinks differently. It focuses on long-term connections that are grounded in making customers more successful and more committed to maintaining a strong relationship with their suppliers.

3D organizations, in contrast, believe that being customer-centered is based on results—on outcomes that can always get better. Those results for customers are on a trajectory, not a flat line. In turn, the progress that needs to happen to create that trajectory can be—even has to be—measured.

The Customer 3D™ system uses a measurement process, yielding a Customer 3D™ Index, which can quantify the progress toward becoming more customer-centered. It’s fun and it’s profitable for the organizations that embrace it. But, the most important reward is the reaction of their customers. They love it and are more engaged with the companies that provide it.

You are either getting better or getting worse in your performances for customers. You can never stay the same. The secret is to set goals for how much you want to change and clear metrics to identify when you have achieved those goals. The ability to monitor your progress is the key to sustaining the innovative work being done for your customers. 3D leaders never stand still in their search for new ways to make their organization work better for their customers.

The Customer 3D™ system measures momentum inside an organization, a concept that means the “amount of motion” that is happening for customers. It is an approach that transcends individual transactions to ask, “What else can we improve?” It tracks the ways in which organizations touch the lives of their customers.

KaBOOM! is a non-profit organization focused on the importance of play for children. They have built thousands of playgrounds which have created a sense of community in some of the toughest and poorest neighborhoods in North America. Their staff and volunteers understand that, while the physical play spaces which they help communities create are important, that there are also “ripples” in the follow-on effects that impact the sense of community and pride the local volunteers feel by being a part of the creation. The term ripple came from a Robert Kennedy speech in Cape Town, South Africa, in which he said, “Each time a person stands up for an ideal, or acts to improve the lot of others…he sends forth a tiny ripple of hope.”

Exceptionally customer-centered companies also understand this ripple effect. They rally their employees and their culture around the powerful work they are doing at their company to touch the lives of their customers.  Their measure is the level of innovation that occurs for customers and they use this data and the related success stories to motivate the organization to do even more for their customers.  This perspective helps the employees to realize the positive impact that they are having on customers.

There is so much more available to companies today than building a customer service presence one transaction at a time. Customer 3D™ gives businesses a sense of what is possible. When a company invests in organization-wide culture changes that focus on high-level customer relationships, it changes its entire approach.3D organizations go far beyond the transaction. They measure transformation.

Imagine parents attempting to give their child “everything.” It can take on a narcissistic quality, built on the philosophy that “If we give him everything, we will have a great relationship.” But this approach can ultimately fail when it is based only on the parents’ definition. Perhaps they should question what is not being given. Perhaps the child really wants them to be involved with his success, provide him with personal attention and treat him as an intelligent adult. Customers are the same. They want suppliers to provide valuable outcomes that go beyond the products that they purchase. They want those suppliers to care about their success.

One-dimensional service approaches can cause companies to set expectations for customer needs too low. It’s easy to think that customers only want what we have been giving them all along. This is “status quo bias” – people prefer to leave things the way they are. Customer 3D™ organizations counter this with a passion for originality.

Take a creative new look at your organization. Remove the product that your company sells from the equation (temporarily, of course) and concentrate on the image behind it – what is left, in other words, when the product disappears. Now, create a customer-centered strategy that defines the way that you want customers to see you. Make this strategy detailed and list activities that employees should be doing for customers. But also set your standards higher than today’s expectations. Set a goal that stretches the organization and empowers employees. It will help the entire organization understand how it can become more customer-centric after the product is put back into the equation.

Customer-centricity only happens when there is a vibrant dialogue with customers that sharpens an organization’s focus on what those customers need. It has nothing to do with meeting what they expect. They are going to expect basically what you have been giving them all along. Instead, 3D organizations are driven to change customers’ expectations – by proactively delivering better, more collaborative outcomes. The Customer 3D™ system and culture measures its success by its ever-improving performance for the customer.

The three-dimensional holography process was accidentally discovered in 1947 while scientist Dennis Gabor was working to improve the electron microscope. However, holograms were not utilized until the 1960’s with the invention of the laser, which provided the purer, more intense light that was necessary to create useful holograms. Today, holography has produced thousands of new products, including 3D models to aid surgical planning or forensic science investigations, holographic data storage and retrieval, and improved supermarket scanners.

Not only are holograms versatile, but they are also uncopyable. This characteristic allowed the three-dimensional pictures to be developed into a low-cost security device for documents such as credit cards and currency.

3D thinking within organizations also makes those companies very difficult to copy. Companies that are highly customer-centered are recognizable by customers with a difference that goes far beyond their products. They have the capability across the entire organization to envision almost endless ways to add value for their customers. The process parallels the development of holography, where the inventors took a new technology and found uses based on what people were telling them. Customer 3D™ companies have the same heightened abilities to create continuous refinements to match their customers’ needs.

3D organizations do their work for the customer, not to be different. The visionary culture they have developed, however, does make them noticeably different and harder to copy. Their sales and markets are expanding because customers are drawn to doing business with companies that listen and truly understand their needs.

Making your organization unique is a prime result of the Customer 3D™ system. It takes customer-centricity to a new dimension that delivers real differentiation between your organization and the rest of the market. It makes you uncopyable.

What do they do in these less hectic times? They call customers and proactively ask how they can help them. They want to know what the needs of those customers are. They want to have a dialogue that will uncover new ideas that the company can put into place that will add value to customers. Whereas product-centered companies during “down” times look to customers for additional orders for their existing products, 3D organizations are looking for new products and processes for their customers. Customer 3D™ organizations take ownership of connecting with their customers by telephone, observation, social media and every other means possible in order to find out how they can improve in the areas that matter most to those customers.

Exceptionally customer-centered organizations are good listeners. Part of the internal assessment of Customer 3D™ businesses includes a component that determines how well they identify new opportunities. When direct contact with customers is not feasible, these extraordinary organizations have meetings to discuss opportunities for improving products and processes on behalf of their customers. They are hardwired to sustain customer-centricity on an upward trajectory, in other words, through closer connections with what customers need to be more successful.

All great public speakers will tell you that it is the speakers’ responsibility to connect with their audience. If the audience does not seem interested in what they are saying, then don’t blame them. The same thing is true with customers. Customer-centered organizations believe that it is their responsibility to connect with their customers—not the other way around.

Customer 3D™ organizations know that customers’ relationships with them will be exponentially stronger if those customers feel they are receiving authentic inquiries about their success. It galvanizes the connection by demonstrating that both the company and the customer are working for the same purpose.

Products satisfy those needs only at a basic level. Therefore, exceptional organizations have moved beyond the verbs that ordinary, traditional companies continue to use—sell, push, serve, react, retain, and lock-in. Customer 3D™ organizations have created strong cultures in which all employees are experts at doing the following for their customers:

Going forward, the successful business has to be focused on the new relationship that customers expect from their suppliers. Customer 3D™ creates a system to be mindful of the new customer verbs and to embrace the opportunities for organizations to take care of these higher level customer needs.