Establishing a successful customer-first strategy is not as easy as you may think. Many organisations purport to be focused on the customer journey and customer outcomes, while more often than not it's more of an after-thought.
In reality, a winning customer-first strategy must incorporate robust decision-making processes which accurately reflect your customers 'personas" - that is truly related to your clients' needs and laser-focused on solving their specific problems.
Having now worked in this industry for the best part of 25 years, I can safely that my experiences have leaned to the former.
At Emu, we’ve recently shared our experiences and acknowledging this as a potential issue, we’re currently undergoing training in design thinking (with the help of our Partners at Neu21), in an effort to truly understand, identify and eradicate some of the issues our customers can face, and improve the overall experience when engaging a Search Firm.
For those of you unfamiliar, design thinking is a non-linear, iterative process that teams use to understand users, challenge assumptions, redefine problems and create innovative solutions to prototype and test. Typically a process involves 5 phases and allows teams to tackle problems in human-centric ways, focussing on what’s most important for the user.
We’ve spent a lot of time so far in the ‘discovery’ phase, mapping out individual client and candidate persona’s, and challenging some widely held assumptions. We've explored the customer journey map to better understand the pain points and their frame of mind when undertaking this process.
Next up the fun really starts. I won’t give too much, suffice to say that if you’re reading this, you may be receiving a call very soon!
After 25 years in the recruitment industry, I personally wondered whether there was much more about my role and industry I could learn.
I can safely say, I spoke way too soon!
PS. If you’re interested in finding out how differently we do things at Emu Search, drop me a line in confidence at dominic@emusearch.com.au