The history of business is littered with the corpses of companies that did not properly consider the needs of their customers.

Against this, the LinkedIn Shonkr group’s research aims to ensure senior managers and others using LinkedIn as a point of learning and reference recognise the vulnerability of every business’s reputation to adverse reports shared on social media, such as those promoted by Shonkr.

By exercising such simple caution, these individuals can begin to think more clearly about how to manage – and to preempt, through better organisation – the consequences of this risk better.

Repeatedly failing the ​​customer experience (CX) can by any definition deliver a crisis – a situation that threatens to overwhelm the organisation if the right decisions are not taken.

If readers are investors, they need to consider how they can ask better thought-out questions of management about what is happening in those businesses in which they invest, and indeed, about what is happening in their own, and about how they will organise better to mitigate their risk and optimise their returns. 

And they need to understand how they need to, and can, and will, change their own business’s thinking to focus minds across their organisations on improving the way they and their investees treat customers across those patrons’ entire customer journey.

Just as business’s history may be peppered with failures, toxic workplaces and managers also exist aplenty. With the right invitation, we now have a lever to investigate those, too.

Because problems are too often a result of legacy and culture, in considering this, leaders will recognise their need to understand how to root out at source the causes and cost of managerial toxicity and the resulting manifestations of bullying and contempt at work within their business that can create persisting customer-facing problems.

Outward behaviours that warn customers off may be just as damaging as those which treat them badly once they have been captured. 

Decision makers must recognise that unless they lift their game to optimise their business not around process, but around their customers, making them absolutely central to their focus and business models, their businesses may quickly come to exist no more.

Because this research is the canary in the coal mine sent in to reveal potentially even greater problems in any company that is subject to this tool’s probing, employees will need to evaluate whether the business they currently work for has a future in its current form, and whether they want to stay with it or move on.

Without such examination, many readers will find themselves working for organisations that are simply uncompetitive and unprepared against what the future throws at them.

A key principle of crisis management is to work out where and how a situation is going to end in a position that best protects the organisation or individual, on principles that can consistently be defended. As an incumbent manager or employee, it may be time to make this principle your own.

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Connect with me via LinkedIn – Graham Lauren – or by joining the Shonkr group at LinkedIn.