Getting intimate with the customer

N: What is the customer intimacy for you and your company?

Zoran: Maybe before I share what is it for me and in my company I am actually very happy that we are talking about customer intimacy for many reasons.

One, because the whole concept was actually coined around customer centricity which in combination with article in HBR was also coined by Don Peppers and Martha Rogers, two people that I had the opportunity to work with in Peppers and Rogers Group that came up with this whole concept of one to one marketing which then translated in customer centricity and customer experience, which then kinda got to full circle and became a customer intimacy concept, which is important to discuss and obviously to understand in terms how do, you know, how do customers get treated in both B2B relationships and B2C relationships as we engage with our customers and with our clients. And the customer intimacy, in the context of my company or in general, it’s all related to this whole idea of treating the customer the way you want to be treated.

I think that is a starting point in order to succeed in anything that is customer centric, anything that can even get a flavor of being more customer intimate. That actually means really, really understanding the customer needs, the customer’s ambition, finding the customer in the right time, with the right story, with the right offer, with the right proposition and kind driving that relationship more toward this one to one relationship. Because not every customer is the same, not every customer has same needs, they are not at the same maturity level. Especially in B2B environments it’s quite an interesting topic and lot of things can be written about that, a lot of strategy and consultancy can be used around this topic, but at the end of the day I interpret this and really putting a strategy in place and putting an effort behind treating the customer the way you want to be treated.

N: I wanna go back to Centili itself and your role there, as a business leader you need to empower your company and your employees to get these ideas and to get more intimate with the customers but I am sure that there is another question here, that you can basically build a company’s culture around this idea. How are you managing to do that?

Zoran:Yeah. So, it’s very important that if you preach that you are a customer centric company, you don’t do this by putting posters and values on a wall in your office and say I am a customer centric company.

N: To define as a mission or vision.

Zoran: To define as a mission or vision that nobody reads anymore. You do a spot check of your people that they don’t even remember. That’s not a point. The point is to actually build value propositions and build your goal to market propositions in a way as if you are the customer. And test everything first internally on yourself as if you were in the shoes of the customer.

Only through that process and only through measuring that process, you put yourself in a better position. To, number 1, deliver on some kind of customer promises that you are making. Number 2, changing the approaches depending on the segments that you treat and segments that you serve with. And then also even incentives and reward your team based on the feedback that you get from the customers, based on the results that you deliver to these customers and everything else that you think of to this process.

It’s very important that you put a customer in a center because the customer is the king and that’s true in many industries and that’s true in many segments. And really start your everyday activities and your everyday tasks that you do in your everyday work with the customer in the center. Not with the technology, not with the product, not with the process or everything else that we always have around us. But actually put a customer in a center, understanded, research it, read about it, follow the trends and then adopt and change if you need to in order to get closer. And we do exactly the same in our organization.

Obviously it starts with the system where you track your customer, it starts with the right incentive plans, and it starts with teams that are all customer focused and that they actually work with customers, involve your customers in product testing, in pilot projects, co-create with your customers in order than not to have as many misses as you might have if you do things without the customers.

N: I wanna talk about innovations itself a little bit more and I wanna ask you about other types of innovations in your company. Since I know that since you came to Centili as a Group CEO, you started initiatives that should jump-start innovations throughout the company. Can you give me some examples of those innovations that you started and that are in direct relationship maybe with customer intimacy?

Zoran: For me, innovation just as a term, it’s not something that you do one of, it’s not a department that sits in the corner of the office that waits for everybody to come up with some innovation. I think innovation is the state of the way you wanna do your business and state of mind. And it’s something that you will want to encourage throughout the organization. Especially in an industry like ours that is internet based, that is digital based, it’s very disruptive, very fluid, which means you are required to innovate not just from product perspective but also from business model perspective, from the thinking perspective almost all the time.

So, for us innovation is actually really thinking through an agile way of changing ourselves first in order to meet the market requirements, the market disruptions, to then also to address the needs of customers, to be faster than our competitors and deliver more and clearer customer experience and superior value proposition. And for us in that case we spend quite a bit of time looking at how do we first disrupt ourselves in order to turn out a new idea or different business model and then very, very quickly move into the pilot stage, find the first customer with whom you can test and try. Find a friendly one then maybe even take the peace of innovation for free, just to be that anchor as we like to call it the flywheel then go and take this to the market so then we can use that to get better, maybe improve it and later on commercialized if it is something that is really next best thing that we produce.

N: You told me that you want to disrupt internally, I know that throughout many conversations with you earlier, I know that one of the things since you came to Centili and one of the novelist that you brought was OKRs. Can you share with me some high level advice on how to successfully implement OKRs?

Zoran: I mean OKRs are obviously a great methodology and a great tool originally, also coined by Google, and books are also written about it. And it’s all about putting measurement strategy and methodology in place that focus is on objectives and key results and it’s all about really measure what matters.

So, we can, you know, traditional companies and especially sometimes startups or maybe scale ups like what we are, we get blocked down with KPIs and by score card and we measure all kind of unimportant things and here OKRs really allow you to design objectives and results that have direct impact on company’s performance and then link this across the organization and across team to encourage collaboration and actually coexistence and actually even sharing of the same objectives and results in order to achieve the company’s top objectives and that allows for easier management and for accountability, it’s very, very transparent. Every single day I know what everybody is working on because I can see his key results and his objectives on the system. Everybody is encouraged to update its on, everybody knows who else is depending on in order to complete something that they promised they will do. And with that change obviously accountability has risen in organization, there is much less empty a neutral gears if I can call so, and therefore we are excited and embarked on this process, you know, it’s still learning for us and I think we are getting better at it, but it definitely helps run the organization in a totally different way than what it was before.

N: Maybe we can connect customer intimacy and OKRs, can you give me an example of one of the objectives that you took that is connected with customer intimacy itself?

Zoran: I mean, one of the key and biggest objectives we had in our OKR approach to customer intimacy was actually to launch a customer success team. And then behind the customer, first to put together a customer success team, customer success team without customer success strategy has no real job so you have to do a customer success strategy and then within the customer success strategy you start to launch different customer intimacy programs. Select customers that you actually really wanna treat in a specific manir, customers that I said in our terminology of flywheels those that really, really are driving your business and with whom you can do much more than you’ve done before. Not just from building join products and propositions but those that also you can up sale in a future with some new things that you are working on and all that was put originally in a set of OKRs that are kind carried and owned by our customer success team and people that are responsible with and relationship with a customer. Start with key customers because obviously you can be too ambitious. But mentality and attitude needs to be that you actually have to treat every customer in the way you wanna be treated.

N: Yeah, love that example because it’s showing going from top-down and that is the idea behind OKRs always. Because usually those are the mistakes when somebody is implementing OKR that they are not doing that way. It’s usually easier and more natural it’s coming to go from down-up but like this you get better results.

Zoran: And also all of us that no matter where do we sit in the organization and if you wanna call it from the top we are also still responsible for everything that trickles down, correct? And that is how you start to create this dependency and these links that this is not just somebody’s OKR, this is the company’s OKR and all of us participate in one or another way. And I think that is the beauty of it, it has a less chance to fail simply because there are many contributors and many people have a dependency on making sure this succeeds and it’s a great methodology.

N: You mentioned earlier measuring and of course it’s so important but big data and analytics are a huge part of this and when we are talking about customer intimacy strategies those are one of the pillars of it. How are you leveraging this in Centili?

Zoran: I mean, we are lucky because we are in a business that is a payment transactional business, so we collect a lot of data and over ten years, you can just imagine how much data we have. And maybe we, as a company, probably never used it as much as we should but you know, I know examples of other companies that are in a similar position. These days, if you wanna succeed, progress, if you wanna grow and if you have ambition like we do to double and triple our business you have to be data driven. And data driven actually means understanding the data that you have, having superior analytical skills, having great analysts, use AI, do some stuff that is predictable, match the data that you have with third party data, you know, to make intelligence and better decisions for your business and for your customers. So, for us, it’s a huge, huge pillar, it’s very important in order for us to make smarter decisions, to make better decisions, to save more money and then eventually to make more money.

N: I know that is coming now, it’s ten years for Centili and you have a huge anniversary and everything and I will come to that later. I wanna ask a question regarding the growth of the team because this year even with Corona and everything you manage to rebuild the team and get a bigger one. Can you share with me some stories regarding that growth and how that reflected on your business this year?

Zoran: I mean, I think that we both can agree that 2020., you know, came out to be something that none of us ever imagined. And when the year started we had different ambitions and we had different ideas and probably different strategies, but the beauty of our industry and the businesses that we are in and maybe some of us that have different butterflies in our stomach this disruption is exactly what we like.

When I say this, I am mindful of people that are hurted by the pandemic and I’m talking from the business perspective. And for us the year was a growth year, it was a year where we had to reinvent, where we had to change and the strategy that we implemented was shifting years strategy, which is the strategy about change and you are right.

From the day I landed, which was 1st of March until the end of year we hired 27 people, we hired 10 women in our team, we changed the management team, we had a complete new approach of how we wanna do things and where we wanna take the company. So, yeah, doing this in remote fashion was interesting and we proved that it is possible. But, yeah, we were fortunate enough that the company is in good shape and that we had capacity to hire, we had capacity to change and now we are looking forward to what 2021 brings.

N: And just to reflect Covid and I’m sure that in a year when you started to bring people it was very hard to have people working from home and all remote things. How you tackled that stuff? Especially from your perspective because you came as CEO, get a new team and everything and need to share energy, vision, ideas.

Zoran: Yes, it was very interesting. First day on a job it’s the first day of a first case, in our country three days later I send the entire team home and here it is with a new CEO, new strategy, new energy, and work from home.

N: New pandemic.

Zoran: New pandemic and work from home for ten months. But you have to quickly think, to quickly adjust, you have to quickly find a way of that engagement and to start to build the relationship internally, start to build trust with the people that are there and with the people that you are bringing in. I mean, a very, very interesting story, we had colleagues that were hired in this process and that meet each other in the street and they say “O, you look familiar but I’m not very sure from where.”, and they are actually working for the same company. Because they didn’t have a chance to see each other in the office.

But when you hear these stories you just say “Listen, that’s the new normal, that’s probably what’s gonna continue to happen for quite some time and we just have to deal with it and have to live with it.” But for us, yeah, we had to readjust, we were doing a lot of things remotely, onboarding new stuff, training new stuff, getting them excited. One of the ways is communicated more frequently, I had more town halls than I had in my career, I had more meetings and video calls and team meetings, catch ups and stand ups than I ever had in any other company and it wasn’t that difficult. I just realised that I have to do it if I want to transmit my energy, transmit the new vision and new strategy in order for us to move ahead. And, yeah, we did as much as we could and I think we did quite well.

N: I know you for a while now and I know your style regarding the management and people and everything, and I know that you love creating great events for your people and hopefully this year is going to change regarding Covid and everything, and you will have a chance to do that here in Centili, as well.

Zoran: Well, yeah, good news and I think great news for the company is that we are celebrating our ten years anniversary, actually next week. And for us that’s a milestone simply because in a tech industry, in a startup industry not too many companies see two years, let alone five years, can you imagine ten years. So, it’s a testament to everybody that believes in this company. Everybody that still is in a company from the very beginning and we have quite a few of those employees, which I think it’a a great, great achievement for them.

Many of us that just came to the party in a tenth year, we are gonna take a lot of credit, but actually we need to be thankful to everybody that built this company in the past. But, you are right, celebration this year will be different, it will be mostly online with quite bit of events that are related to great speakers, great motivations in rebranding, in relaunching our own identity and really try to leave a mark, but you are right, at the moment restrictions are gonna be removed and so on, people will hear about Centili’s party.

N: So, we started today’s innovation dialogue about what is customer intimacy for you and your company. Can you share with me your vision, I wanna talk about the future right now. What is going to be with customer intimacy in the future, in what customer intimacy and customer relationship is going to evolve?

Zoran: I think the success of customer relationships and customer intimacy will all be around the companies that are willing to first put the customer in a centre and build their own organization, their mindset and the culture around the customer. Not around anymore the product, the technology, the value proposition that they were thinking about but really about the customer needs, the customer behaviors and knowledge about customers. So, I think that’s happening in many industries already and many companies that are thriving right now, they are really doing this just because they really, really understand customers very, very well. And I think for the future and for the company that really wanna succeed and really wanna grow at the speed that they envision and maybe their market and the industry is asking them to follow, it’s gonna be around them getting this strategy right and investing behind the right strategy and behind the right people and the culture within the company to be a bit more customer centric.