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Jill Griffin on "Boardroom Buy-In"
We’ve all heard it said a million times: “You can’t successfully drive customer-centricity without c-suite buy-in.” But what about boardroom buy-in? It’s an area of support often overlooked (or considered off limits) in fighting the internal corporate tugs of war that typically accompany a firm’s struggle for customer-centricity.
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Document Transcript:
Boardroom Buy-In: How To Earn It, How To Keep It
By Jill Griffin, Griffin Group
We've all heard it said a million times: "You can't successfully drive customer-centricity without
c-suite buy-in." But what about boardroom buy-in? It's an area of support often overlooked (or
considered off limits) in fighting the internal corporate tugs of war that typically accompany a
firm's struggle for customer-centricity.
Since 2003, I have served as corporate board director for a New York Stock Exchange
company. Take it from me: A lot more can happen for the customer with boardroom support
than without it. Here're four suggestions for getting your customer strategies on the boardroom
radar screen–and winning boardroom advocates for your hard-fought initiatives:
1. Push to get customer strategies on the board room agenda. Are your firm's
customer strategies and programs getting face time with board members? If not, why
not?
The Enron-era of "hands off" boardroom oversight is dead. Personal liability, outside
regulators and aggressive investment funds have forced board members to amp up
strategic oversight like never before. Listen in on "best practices" seminars for board
directors, and you're likely to hear this philosophy: The most important part of a board's
role is to set corporate strategy in cooperation with management, define the risk
parameters inherent in the strategy and ensure the corporation has the talent to realize
the strategy. Moreover, the board is also tasked with periodically testing the strategy's
competitive resilience.
Do you and your customer management teams have meaningful input to assist the
board in its strategy oversight? Yes! The key is in how you deliver that input. Push your
program awareness through the c-suite and into the boardroom by "packaging" it
through the lens of corporate governance and directorship.
2. Speak the language of the boardroom. Now's the time to pull your corporate finance
and accounting texts off the bookshelf. "Earnings per share," "EBITDA," "net income,"
"cash flow," "same-store-sales," "market capitalization," "margin"–this is some of the
language of corporate governance. As a dyed-in-the-wool customer advocate, I would
love to tell you that board director education programs and board meetings consistently
overflow with discussion concerning customer engagement, customer experience,
customer relationship management, customer centricity and the like. Instead, my boardexperience has taught me that public company boards are often seated with financially-
oriented directors tightly focused on four key elements:
a. Financial performance
b. Operations performance
c. Risk management
d. Strategy
Your best bet for getting and keeping customer advocacy issues on the boardroom radar
screen is to report on your strategies through the context of one or more of these board
agenda items.
3. Make your data matter. How about your customer survey insights? Employee
engagement insights? Here's one way to harness board interest in your findings:
Overlay this information on same-store-sales data or other financial performance data
that the board regularly reviews. Can you demonstrate the predictive abilities of your
customer/employee data? For example, did the softening in Quarter 1's customer
satisfaction ratings foretell the dip in Quarter 2's same-store-sales? Your ability to
"connect the dots" and identify trends is an important step to earning and keeping
boardroom attention focused on customer management issues.
Most public boards are accustomed to evaluating corporate performance using what I
refer to in my board work as "lagging" indicators. Think about it: Same-store-sales,
earnings per share, EBITDA and the like are measures of what has occurred, rather than
what is coming. Therein lies your customer management team's huge opportunity!
Measured "correctly," such gauges as customer loyalty metrics, customer value metrics
and employee engagement metrics should help predict what's coming. But it's important
that the data's predictability is reliable. That's why the constant historical analyses I
suggest earlier is so critical.
4. Lobby strategically. When you are given the opportunity to spend time with board
members, invest the time wisely. Consider this scenario: You are part of a handful of
managers invited by the CEO to have dinner with the board. How do you prepare?
Read the board director bios (and any other information available) well ahead of the
dinner and consider which board members are most likely to be your easiest-to-win
allies. If possible, target those directors first. For example, if the director has a deep
banking background, over dinner conversation compare some of your current customer
challenges and initiatives to high-profile banking case studies.
Always remember, this seemingly informal conversation time is an incredibly fertile
bridge-building opportunity. But guard against the oversell. Let the director get to know
you as a person, too. In the end, though, your ability to demonstrate how customer
initiatives are driving corporate performance and success is how you build boardroom
advocacy.
There has never been a better time to nurture boardroom awareness and support for your
customer centricity strategies. The backlash from sleep-at-the-switch board directors (think
WorldCom and Tyco) has fed an unprecedented culture of boardroom accountability. And that's
just the opening you need! Start now to think about how to get your firm's directors on your
customer advocacy team. It's time well spent.About Jill Griffin
Jill Griffin's clients call her The Loyalty Maker® for good reason. Since 1988, she has led
the Austin-based Griffin Group, helping firms around the globe build fiercely loyal
customers. Clients served include Microsoft, Dell, Toyota, Marriott, Hewlett-Packard, Wells
Fargo, Western Union and Subaru.
Jill's next book, Taming the Search-and-Switch Customer: Earning Loyalty in a
Compulsion-to-Compare World, will hit bookstores March 2009. Jill's book Customer
Loyalty: How to Earn It, How to Keep It was named to Harvard Business School's
"Working Knowledge" list and has been published in six languages. Her co-authored book,
Customer Winback, earned Soundview Executive Book Summaries' "Best Books" award.
Since 2003, Jill has served on the Board of Directors for restaurant chain Luby's
Incorporated, a New York Stock Exchange company with 129 locations and 7,000+
employees. She has served on the marketing faculty at the University of Texas McCombs
School of Business. Her books have been adopted as textbooks for MBA and
undergraduate customer management courses taught at UT and other universities. Jill is a
Magna Cum Laude graduate and Distinguished Alumna recipient of the University of South
Carolina Moore School of Business from which she holds her MBA. Reach Jill at 512 469
1757 and jill@loyaltysolutions.com.
By Jill Griffin, Griffin Group
We've all heard it said a million times: "You can't successfully drive customer-centricity without
c-suite buy-in." But what about boardroom buy-in? It's an area of support often overlooked (or
considered off limits) in fighting the internal corporate tugs of war that typically accompany a
firm's struggle for customer-centricity.
Since 2003, I have served as corporate board director for a New York Stock Exchange
company. Take it from me: A lot more can happen for the customer with boardroom support
than without it. Here're four suggestions for getting your customer strategies on the boardroom
radar screen–and winning boardroom advocates for your hard-fought initiatives:
1. Push to get customer strategies on the board room agenda. Are your firm's
customer strategies and programs getting face time with board members? If not, why
not?
The Enron-era of "hands off" boardroom oversight is dead. Personal liability, outside
regulators and aggressive investment funds have forced board members to amp up
strategic oversight like never before. Listen in on "best practices" seminars for board
directors, and you're likely to hear this philosophy: The most important part of a board's
role is to set corporate strategy in cooperation with management, define the risk
parameters inherent in the strategy and ensure the corporation has the talent to realize
the strategy. Moreover, the board is also tasked with periodically testing the strategy's
competitive resilience.
Do you and your customer management teams have meaningful input to assist the
board in its strategy oversight? Yes! The key is in how you deliver that input. Push your
program awareness through the c-suite and into the boardroom by "packaging" it
through the lens of corporate governance and directorship.
2. Speak the language of the boardroom. Now's the time to pull your corporate finance
and accounting texts off the bookshelf. "Earnings per share," "EBITDA," "net income,"
"cash flow," "same-store-sales," "market capitalization," "margin"–this is some of the
language of corporate governance. As a dyed-in-the-wool customer advocate, I would
love to tell you that board director education programs and board meetings consistently
overflow with discussion concerning customer engagement, customer experience,
customer relationship management, customer centricity and the like. Instead, my boardexperience has taught me that public company boards are often seated with financially-
oriented directors tightly focused on four key elements:
a. Financial performance
b. Operations performance
c. Risk management
d. Strategy
Your best bet for getting and keeping customer advocacy issues on the boardroom radar
screen is to report on your strategies through the context of one or more of these board
agenda items.
3. Make your data matter. How about your customer survey insights? Employee
engagement insights? Here's one way to harness board interest in your findings:
Overlay this information on same-store-sales data or other financial performance data
that the board regularly reviews. Can you demonstrate the predictive abilities of your
customer/employee data? For example, did the softening in Quarter 1's customer
satisfaction ratings foretell the dip in Quarter 2's same-store-sales? Your ability to
"connect the dots" and identify trends is an important step to earning and keeping
boardroom attention focused on customer management issues.
Most public boards are accustomed to evaluating corporate performance using what I
refer to in my board work as "lagging" indicators. Think about it: Same-store-sales,
earnings per share, EBITDA and the like are measures of what has occurred, rather than
what is coming. Therein lies your customer management team's huge opportunity!
Measured "correctly," such gauges as customer loyalty metrics, customer value metrics
and employee engagement metrics should help predict what's coming. But it's important
that the data's predictability is reliable. That's why the constant historical analyses I
suggest earlier is so critical.
4. Lobby strategically. When you are given the opportunity to spend time with board
members, invest the time wisely. Consider this scenario: You are part of a handful of
managers invited by the CEO to have dinner with the board. How do you prepare?
Read the board director bios (and any other information available) well ahead of the
dinner and consider which board members are most likely to be your easiest-to-win
allies. If possible, target those directors first. For example, if the director has a deep
banking background, over dinner conversation compare some of your current customer
challenges and initiatives to high-profile banking case studies.
Always remember, this seemingly informal conversation time is an incredibly fertile
bridge-building opportunity. But guard against the oversell. Let the director get to know
you as a person, too. In the end, though, your ability to demonstrate how customer
initiatives are driving corporate performance and success is how you build boardroom
advocacy.
There has never been a better time to nurture boardroom awareness and support for your
customer centricity strategies. The backlash from sleep-at-the-switch board directors (think
WorldCom and Tyco) has fed an unprecedented culture of boardroom accountability. And that's
just the opening you need! Start now to think about how to get your firm's directors on your
customer advocacy team. It's time well spent.About Jill Griffin
Jill Griffin's clients call her The Loyalty Maker® for good reason. Since 1988, she has led
the Austin-based Griffin Group, helping firms around the globe build fiercely loyal
customers. Clients served include Microsoft, Dell, Toyota, Marriott, Hewlett-Packard, Wells
Fargo, Western Union and Subaru.
Jill's next book, Taming the Search-and-Switch Customer: Earning Loyalty in a
Compulsion-to-Compare World, will hit bookstores March 2009. Jill's book Customer
Loyalty: How to Earn It, How to Keep It was named to Harvard Business School's
"Working Knowledge" list and has been published in six languages. Her co-authored book,
Customer Winback, earned Soundview Executive Book Summaries' "Best Books" award.
Since 2003, Jill has served on the Board of Directors for restaurant chain Luby's
Incorporated, a New York Stock Exchange company with 129 locations and 7,000+
employees. She has served on the marketing faculty at the University of Texas McCombs
School of Business. Her books have been adopted as textbooks for MBA and
undergraduate customer management courses taught at UT and other universities. Jill is a
Magna Cum Laude graduate and Distinguished Alumna recipient of the University of South
Carolina Moore School of Business from which she holds her MBA. Reach Jill at 512 469
1757 and jill@loyaltysolutions.com.
