Since the customer is king, it follows that customer-driven firms take their most valuable resources — people, process and technology — and deploy them in a customer-centric fashion. I’ve found that people are often misplaced, misaligned and frustrated, with poor attitudes that leak out into customer interactions. Too often it feels as though enterprises are enslaved to processes and technology that don’t serve the customer and therefore create frictional commerce.

People, process and technology need to be deployed around the customer to facilitate commerce. To do otherwise makes life overly difficult for everyone involved, especially the customer. A bonus to the customer-centric infrastructure principle is that enterprise resources are optimized to drive productivity and profits.

One Team – One Goal requires leaders and team members to be singularly focused and aligned to achieve shared organizational outcomes. For that to become reality, leadership teams must be honest enough to acknowledge their people-based constraints and organizational misalignment. A major misconception is that only customer-facing functions and positions need be reviewed, but this is shortsighted. Why? Because 100% of team members and functions must be viewed as customer-impacting. If not, why employ them?! As an example, is a customer service team member more important than a fulfillment center worker? Their duties are interdependent, which is why the singularly focused team is crucial to achieving a positive, sustainable customer experience.

Additionally, all companies need to teach their team that we all have customers, internal or external. If we view the people and teams upstream and downstream of us as customers, we develop a more thoughtful mindset.

The perfect customer experience is all flow, no friction. In an “all flow” environment, customers have the ability to conduct business within different functional areas effortlessly throughout the customer life cycle. Those companies practicing the opposite — what I call The Customer Prevention Culture℠ — present unintentional friction throughout the customer life cycle. Adopters of The Culture of Commerce℠ understand selling the customer is not a one-time event. You don’t sell the customer, onboard them and then it’s over. Customer relationships are nurtured over time and grow as trust and credibility are established. This happens as customers interact with different team members throughout the organization. Common interactions and touchpoints include customer service, technical support, fulfillment, sales, quality, accounts receivable and many more. All customer touchpoints build or break confidence and back up the point that ALLteam members have customer-impacting positions (customer-facing and non-customer facing).

One of the principles of The Culture of Commerce is values form culture. The point of values form cultureis to foster a consistently positive customer experience companywide by gaining mass adoption from the team. To make that happen, companies need to determine how they want customers to feel while interacting with their people, process and technology throughout the customer life cycle.

What are your values? Are they merely words that decorate a whiteboard, or is there evidence to support they’re real? More importantly, how will those values translate to how customers feel when they interact throughout the customer life cycle?

In order to lead people and empower teams, values are incredibly important. Companies that practice The Culture of Commerce understand the importance of values in order to push decision making down to the lowest level of the organization.