Last night I attended the steering committee of the Buyer-Centric Commerce Forum in the UK attended by Liz Brown and Steve Leegood of The Prism, Peter Massey of Budd and Alan Mitchell (no weblog yet, get with it, Alan!) and heard some tremendously potent examples of buyer-centric (BC) perspectives in practice from the "practioners" on the steering group - BBC Training and Development (Kate Evans), YouatWork (Wendy Fleet), TenUK (Alex Cheatle) and The Children's Mutual (Nigel Hayward) - all of whom were wrestling and in many cases had overcome the more difficult behavioural, mindset and cultural challenges that BC poses.
I can't mention details for any of these organisation but one very significant learning and real outcome each had in common was the incredibly empowering and motivating effect that adopting BC had had on their key customer-serving employees.... in doing so, underlining one of the major benefits of BC - namely that it's adoption can have a tremendous liberating effect on the development of customer-facing (often junior) employee competencies and behaviour. Simply by giving staff the opportunity to put themselves in the same frame as the customer can build new levels of self-respect as they develop skills in servicing and resolving people's problems. The change in attitude occurs because they now see themselves differently. They can begin to reach outside the organisation to co-create solutions with their peers and their customers. They can share knowledge with other team members enabling specialist communities of expertise to thrive - communities which define the external perception and experience of the buyer-centric brand. The effect of all this is that the former dependent worker becomes more of an independent specialist professional with significant gains in productivity, motivation and job satisfaction....
Back to the Forum itself. The main aim of the meeting was to reconstitute the BCCF and to set in motion several new activities to raise awareness of BC in the UK and beyond (Thanks and praise are due to the original Steering Committee who with limited resources and time have been able to grow substantial interest in BC in the UK over the past 12-18 months).
Plans for the new year include regular six weekly Buyer-Centric networking and speaking events, a continued membership drive, a new BC weblog, regular BC news and content, a research library (particularly for new consumer issues) and the development of case-studies.
Watch out for updates at the online home of the Forum here or even better, get on the next big wave and Become a Founder Member
Anyway, more updates and announcements when I have them ...
Chris
I enjoyed your discourse on some of the employee benefits of adopting a buyer-centric commerce approach.
However, the employee benefits you describe are not limited to buyer-centric organisations. They are also available to any organisation that adopts a more traditional customer-centric model.
The extensive work on high-performance work systems provides a step-by-step approach to delivering these same employee benefits without having to reinvent your business in-line with an as yet largely untried economic business model.
Graham Hill
Independent Management Consultant
Posted by: Graham Hill | September 28, 2004 at 01:19 PM