Today’s interview is with Andy Murray, Founder and Executive Chair, Customer Centric Leadership Initiative at The Sam M. Walton College of Business at The University of Arkansas. Andy joins me today to talk about the aforementioned Customer Centric Leadership Initiative, what customer centricity means, how leadership has been impacted over the last few months, the leader’s experience and what we should be doing to make sure that we deliver a great customer experience.

This interview follows on from my recent interview – Leadership and how to achieve customer centricity – Interview with Minter Dial – and is number 372 in the series of interviews with authors and business leaders that are doing great things, providing valuable insights, helping businesses innovate and delivering great service and experience to both their customers and their employees.

Here’s the highlights of my chat with Andy:

• The marketing space is a total Blue Ocean right now because it’s getting reinvented by customer centric type thinking.
• What is a customer centric organization? I don’t think there’s really an official definition anywhere.
• In my personal view, I think it’s a combination of mindset and method and motivation that puts the wants and desires of the customer at the center of all decision making that impacts the customer experience. It’s also about harmonizing three things: technology, human design and agile.
• The 1st real job of a customer experience person is to go listen to the customer and really understand the problem.
• The pandemic brought everybody into focus and for many they have accelerated their e-commerce roadmap from eight years to eight weeks.
• A lot of leaders have an inability or have not really developed or have been supported in a way that makes them great at uncertainty.
• I think the pandemic has caused people to get really close to their existing customers and to listen to them. And, it wasn’t so much about customer acquisition but more customer closeness.
• There’s a really big push in a lot of companies to go really all the way to the edge on agile. But, that could be more harmful than not that you because they end up not knowing how to harmonize their organization.
• The pressure to tie customer experience initiatives to real business results is going to accelerate because there’s been a lot of money pumped into customer experience areas. But, some of those may not have been guided by working on a problem that can be scaled at a level that shows up in the results.
• We are going to have to put a bit more attention into how we measure customer experience and rethink how that gets ‘scorecarded’ for things to get done.
• Ask yourself: Is there something you could do to improve the customer experience every single day that everyone can do?
• It’s about mindset and about creating discipline and turning discipline in to habit. The habit then drives everything you do. It’s not a function.
• Andy’s Punk CX word: Audacity.
• Andy’s Punk CX brand: Next Door

About Andy

Andy Murray is the Founder and Executive Chair, Customer Centric Leadership Initiative at The Sam M. Walton College of Business at The University of Arkansas as well as the Founder, bigQuest and the Chair of the Asda Foundation.

Andy Murray is a subject matter expert and thought leader in retail/shopper marketing. He has extensive leadership experience through senior roles as SVP of Marketing at Walmart, Chief Customer Officer of Asda UK, as well as founding several startups including ThompsonMurray, Saatchi and Saatchi X, Mercury 11, and most recently, BigQuest. BigQuest’s mission is to help teams and individuals develop a compelling quest that drives growth, professionally and personally. Andy’s own quest has taken him back to Fayetteville, Arkansas, as the Founder and Executive Chair of the Customer Centric Leadership Initiative.

Check out the Customer Centric Leadership Initiative at The Sam M. Walton College of Business, say Hi to Andy on Twitter @AndyLMurray and feel free to connect with him on LinkedIn here.

Image by chenspec from Pixabay