The Waqf Fund organized its 13th Corporate Governance workshop in the Kingdom of Bahrain to discuss the topic of customer-centricity. The senior management of Waqf Fund member institutions including seven CEOs were among the 43 participants of the workshop.
Mr. Khalid Hamad Al-Hamad, Executive Director Banking Supervision at the CBB and Chairman of the Waqf Fund welcomed the participants and introduced the instructor, Dr. Nabil El-Hage, an expert on corporate governance and a former professor at Harvard Business School. Dr. El-Hage led the workshop and discussed two cases and an article from Harvard Business Review. This was followed by an interactive discussion in which participants provided their opinions about handling the situations posed by the cases.
The key learning points from the cases and the discussion were as follows:
- To become a customer-centric company (vs. product-centric), the sales process should be transformed from a hard sell to a consultative sell.
- Companies can establish customer councils comprising of highly motivated and key customers, and this platform can become a source of collaborative product development; “we help customers plan their IT future, and they help us plan ours.”
- Customer-centric businesses understand their customers in great depth and thoroughly understand the value the company offers to them, their business strategies and practices are aligned with the long-term needs of their customers, their employees have been selected, trained and incentivized to put the customer at the heart of all that they do and the company’s interests are aligned with the customers’ interests.
- When we buy a product we are in fact “hiring” it to help us do a “job”. If the job is done well, we tend to hire it again the next time. If the job is done badly we “fire” the product and look for an alternative. “Job” is shorthand for what an individual really seeks to accomplish in a given circumstance.
- Successful innovators identify poorly performed jobs in customers’ lives, and then design products, experiences and processes around those jobs.
At the end the Chairman thanked the participants and the presenter for their contributions to a successful workshop.