As managers and leaders in business, we often look at ways to motivate our teams.
Every team has its own priorities—sales teams are focused on revenue, technology teams on deploying digital experiences, support teams on resolving tickets quickly, and marketing teams on building engagement, etc.
These motivators are what keep the wheels turning, but they can sometimes feel disconnected from each other as each team focusses on their individual KPIs.
What truly brings teams together is being close to the customer.
Meeting customers, listening to their calls, observing how they interact with your business—this shared focus creates alignment.
It’s not just about hitting individual targets — it’s about understanding and solving real customer needs.
The one thing that we’ve observed that unifies teams and creates a culture obsessed with customer experience is: being close to the customer.
We’ve seen managers and executive teams have ‘Customer Love Days’ where everyone picks up the phone and calls a customer to say, ‘thanks for being our customer’.
These are great initiatives, but how do we understand customers, their needs, wants, desires? And how might we embed customer immersion into our everyday routines?
We can change the boardroom conversation from "how can we improve sales and how do we reduce losses" to "what problems are our customers trying to solve".
It's about:
1. Having a two-way conversation with customers, actually hearing them
2. Visiting where they live, seeing where they work
3. Understanding their needs, pain points, wants, desires
4. Checking and benchmarking your process and experience (firsthand)
5. Designing great experiences and iterating
6. Asking your customers again
When leaders take the initiative to connect with customers, it sets a powerful example.
It shifts the conversation from internal goals to external impact, fostering collaboration and driving meaningful innovation.
When teams understand the customer deeply, their work doesn’t just meet metrics — it creates value that resonates.
Once I interviewed a customer about her experience moving home, filmed it, came back to the office and played it for all team members.
Zoom in to obsess. Zoom out to observe. We get to choose. - Rick Rubin
The CXO2 team has spent a lot of time researching and trawling through countless customer review sites, benchmarking how quickly webpages load, measuring which brands accommodate accessibility features such as screen readers or high contrast, understanding how customers in remote communities can access digital services, listening to call recordings to different brands to immerse in customer service touch points, and more!
We’ve been on a mission to understand all these different levers across almost 30+ different industries, for more than 2000+ brands in Australia, and still counting.
Why? Because we're customer obsessed.
We're obsessed about our clients’ customers.
Because we're all about designing great experiences.
Over the past few years there’s been a lot of technological changes and macro trends around digital capabilities and a shift in customer expectations and the resources we have to deliver on these expectations:
- Customers want things quicker
- Cost of living crisis is changing purchasing behaviours
- People can get a whole lot more for free online
- Distribution is changing, supply chains are changing
- Businesses are expected to do more with less
- And more
While we spend a lot of our time trying to optimise sales funnels and simplify processes so we can improve profitability, there’s one thing that we often forget to ask – what do customers want and how do the customers feel?
Customer obsession is about being as close to the customer as you possibly can and immersing yourself in their worlds.
Only when we do this can we design solutions and experiences that they truly desire.
What do customers really want?
As CX Leaders, we often find ourselves looking at spreadsheets or reports and dashboards showing NPS or CSAT commentary. But reading comments is simply not enough.
Last week I was listening to call recordings for a client, because I wanted to understand exactly what the pain-points were and understand call drivers and customer expectations.
But this isn’t enough, listening to a few interactions doesn’t really help us understand why a person makes a phone call.
Recently the team at CXO2 were interviewing a customer who lives in rural Queensland.
She was commenting about mobile experiences. I grew up in the Wide Bay Area in Central Queensland, so I could empathise with her comments about patchy mobile reception.
During the interview, the customer told us that they always needed to go inside a shopping mall while travelling, so they could access the internet on their mobile device, because they didn’t have suitable reception to complete a transaction on an app while on-the-go.
Customer obsession is about getting out of the office, it’s about picking up the phone and speaking with real people that use your product or service, including those who don’t.
Immersion is critical.
There’s a specific digital experience gap that I suspected was a problem based on the customer interviews I completed.
Quite often we’re designing solutions in the boardroom, and we’re building digital products on big screens in our Wi-Fi connected offices, or home office.
But that’s not where our customers are interacting with our brands.
Where do customers order a pizza? Is it in the Level 3 basement carpark at QV Carpark in Melbourne CBD, with patchy 4G reception, before they turn on the ignition to drive home?
Are your customers trying to complete a form online and upload receipts such as claiming a business expense for fuel, while on the road?
Does your customer work in an office (like you) and calling you during the day, or is your customer a nurse/teacher and they’re unable to look at their phone while in the hospital or in the classroom, only to find that your call centre business hours are 9am-5pm?
Do we truly understand our customers? It’s not just about an NPS score.
Designing for the extremes
In Human Centred Design, we leverage several different techniques and methods to truly immerse ourselves in the customer’s worlds, conduct face-to-face interviews or even use ‘fly on the wall’ techniques to observe behaviours.
We’ve had customers tell us one thing during an interview, but when we’ve visited their home and seen what they do, it’s something completely different.
We recall an insurance customer tell us that their most important possession was their bike, but when we visited their home, their bike was at the front of the house, unlocked. We were expecting that their expensive bike would be padlocked or in a garage.
The point is that you can’t get this type of behavioural insight from an email survey.
The only way we can understand these extremes is through immersion.
Do you know how many of your customers are colour blind?
Can your customers navigate your website easily?
How many of your customers are ESL (English as a Second Language) and find it difficult to understand the industry jargon?
How many of your customers actually read and understand your Product Disclosure Statement (PDS) before signing up?
There’s just so many questions to ask when we’re truly customer obsessed.
How do we become customer obsessed?
The easiest way to be customer obsessed is to speak with your customers – anyone can pick up the phone and introduce themselves (as the CEO or GM!) and ask the customer about their experience.
Customer obsession is about doing things, not because it improves sales conversion or helps reduce costs – but because you truly intend to address your customers’ needs, pain points, wants or desires.
To become customer-obsessed, all leaders need to set the example.
First let's zoom out to observe - what are the things common across your customers?
And we're not just talking the Customer Service department, but all leaders in all disciplines.
When we all understand what our customers want, we can work better together.
One of my favourite stories is about a brand that told me that even their Accounts team are responsible for CX: because happy customers pay their bills quicker!
As we've been checking on hundreds of brands across different channels, there’s one thing that’s evident: only a handful of brands respond to customer complaints online 100% of the time. Review sites like Trust Pilot give scores to brands about how responsive they are to customer feedback and how quickly they acknowledge the complaint.
That means a lot of brands are missing out on a valuable step in their journey – acknowledging and responding to customer feedback, particularly complaints.
When a customer makes a complaint online, it means they’ve struggled to communicate with you privately (via phone/webchat/email) and are resorting to a negative online public review to get noticed or vent.
It’s impossible for all businesses to achieve all customer expectations all the time, but the one thing we can do is routinely monitor, review and respond to complaints.
Complaints represent the ‘edge cases’ and the ‘extremes’ of when things go wrong and can help us understand the worst experiences in our businesses.
By understanding these edge cases, we can design processes and build training to better to accommodate a broader spectrum of customer needs, creating better experiences.
Validating feedback – a deep dive example
Let’s circle back on my comment earlier around customers in rural areas.
Before we zoomed out to observe, now let's zoom in to obsess.
After we heard firsthand from a certain segment of customers that there’s a problem accessing mobile websites when they’re out on the road or in places with poor reception (e.g. Carpark), the CXO2 team set out to benchmark mobile website performance.
As Australians, we know there are challenges with 5G coverage, so we've been busy benchmarking exactly how quickly 500+ well-known Australian brands' websites load on 4G networks.
Here’s our findings:
According to recent reports, 5G provides access to roughly 87% of the Australian population. There are plans to improve it, but there’s gaps. Those gaps are met by approximately 97% coverage on 4G networks.
Feedback we heard is that customers are frustrated with slow websites, so they end up calling, or delaying time-sensitive tasks for when they’re at home. Essentially, they can’t do what they want, when they want, how they want.
Our CXO2 benchmarks indicate that 75% of about 500+ Australian brand websites load within 3.4 seconds (fast) when using a desktop computer – this is good, but most people aren’t using desktop computers, except when they’re at work.
In contrast, when we benchmarked mobile 4G website performance across those same brands (combination of real and simulated page speed insights) we observed only 13% of mobile websites loaded in 3.4 seconds (fast) which is a huge gap. That means 87% of customers on mobile network in rural areas are struggling to engage digitally with big brands. In some cases, it took more than 84+ seconds to load some particular websites on a mobile device.
These benchmarks are just an insight into how we've validated that a sample of customer feedback from an interview highlights a broader pain-point impacting a large number of brands and Australians than we possibly could have anticipated.
DON'T STOP until your customers ask: "Why Are You So Obsessed With Me?"
Customer obsession is simple, but it's a shift in our routines and activities.
You might have noticed that we’ve asked a lot of questions in this post, which is exactly what all business leaders should be doing too.
How will you change to help your business become more customer obsessed?
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