BusinessForward

Mick Jagger earnestly sang about his inability to get “Satisfaction.” While driving in his car, he tried and he tried and he tried and he tried, but as the song goes, that man on the radio kept telling him useless information.

Just as The Rolling Stones were dissatisfied with the aimless commercialism of the day prompting the legendary refrain, don’t internal customers want you to give information and solutions suited to them?

Get off of Your Cloud

To position your IT organization as a strategic player, come back to earth, perk up your ears and actively collaborate. It’s critical to understand what internal customers want as well as bring to them what you think they need. A recent article on forbes.com characterizes the best CIOs as those who are excellent listeners.  “In order to be advisers to the rest of the organization, it requires generating good conversations with leaders of every other division of the company,” the article reports.

Why not become a change agent by brainstorming with them directly? Certainly, having a conversation with leaders who are challenged with leveraging technology and tasked with automating processes would provide clarity.  Remember, things are tough all over: HR, Finance, Operations and Sales must make their functional area more effective. With best practices and solutions in your back pocket, you’re positioning your team as difference makers ready to collaborate.

Come to Their Emotional Rescue  

Listening to the customer’s voice to understand expectations is rapidly becoming a key discipline for visionary CIOs. Relying solely on impersonal data like surveys to define the customer experience will fast-track you to losing yourvoice in the business. Ask yourself:  “Do I truly have the perspective to pass a test today on what our internal customers need to meet their objectives?”

A failing grade on expectations will cause you to lose influence at best and get mired in a public failure at worst. Conversely, understanding your customer will keep you firmly rooted in your leadership position should there be a shift in corporate strategy.

Your objectives are clear. Among them, you must:

• Align your organization to meet business objectives.
• Transform business processes.
• Quantify your value across the corporation.
• Scale growth organizations.
• Drive customer satisfaction.
• Integrate multiple locations and acquisitions.
• Make innovative ideas come to life.

Are the customer’s goals as clear to you as your own?

If a customer’s strongest desire is to have a single point of contact for all communications, do you understand the value of that to their business? You will, after you’ve spent time listening to horror stories of disconnects between sales and merchandising or HR and finance. The truth is, their horror stories are your horror stories. You are all ultimately responsible for serving people outside of your walls.

Start Them Up

Long before you work with your customer on establishing an SLA, you’ll need to listen to what would make their lives easier and the processes more effective.

Twist and turn your customer’s challenges like a Rubik’s Cube.  Asking what they expect should be as germane to daily life as ensuring your technology solutions are impervious to security risks. It may be a puzzle, but proactively starting conversations makes aligning their goals with your services (and ultimately the business strategy) easier when you “get” their problems and help them shape their answers.

They Can Always Get What They Want

You now know what technology your customer needs, so you can present the right solution for optimal time-to-market/time-to-value, helping them ease any apprehension through their value chain. Because you deeply understand the complexity of your customer’s challenge, you know service levels and performance metrics that are expected of your services and solutions.  Talk about actionable!

It’s unlikely that there is any downside to enriching personal relationships across the organization. Who doesn’t want to have their ideas heard? It’s time to leap over that pile of impersonal surveys and service requests to gauge what they want and join the customer-centric revolution by listening, collaborating and giving them what they need.

Now that’s satisfaction.