Unlocking the Customer Value Chain: How Decoupling Drives Consumer Disruption

by Thales S. Teixeira

As scholars in the discipline of motivational psychology have found, people will freely perform a desired task only if two conditions are satisfied. First, they must possess the basic skills and resources to perform the task. Lacking the ability to perform the task, they might attempt it, but they certainly won’t succeed. Second, even if people can perform the task, they must want to do it. It follows that to motivate employees to focus on customers’ needs, companies must equip them to do so, and provide the proper incentives. To equip employees to favor the customer’s evolving needs and wants, companies must put a great deal at employees’ disposal, including opportunities to observe or connect with customers, intellectual approaches for understanding customers and responding to their demands, internal processes that employees can deploy inside a company to work on behalf of customers, and finally, actual experience in dealing with customers.