THE END OF THE BENEFICIARY, THE RETURN OF THE CUSTOMER

Why a shift from ‘beneficiary’ to ‘customer’ has the potential to be one of the greatest paradigm shifts facing the development industry 

If we want the people we serve to become self-reliant, we have to treat them as customers, not beneficiaries. We have to focus on value as they define it, not as we do. We have to give them options and choice. 

We have to ask if what we are doing provides the best value and adapt our work every day. 

We have to make our organizations more permeable to customer demand and feedback. 

Amazon has trained me to be the most sophisticated customer on earth; they have led me on a journey to establish and define value. They have taught me that their job, every day, is to exceed my expectations, to predict my demand, to provide me value, and to advance my quality of life.  

Amazon can make great suggestions about what I might like or need, but ultimately, I click on where I see value. If we want to make people self-reliant, we have to listen like our lives, careers, and the impact we can have depend on it – because they do. We have to be willing to ask if what we are doing now, and how we do it, provides value. International organizations depend on a game of “telephone” to find out what a customer really needs or wants. Messages from the field are filtered, shaped, and sanitized as they make their way back to HQ. 

 Today, there are more than 700 million cell phones in Africa, so there’s no need to rely on that game of telephone anymore. Instead, we can have direct access to customers relying on our programs or who are using our products and services. We can get their feedback, take it seriously, and change what we do based on it...and then we can seek their feedback again. In Silicon Valley they call this endless cycle “user-centered design.”  

But it’s really just good business sense. 

Similar to many businesses, the International Aid Community has our own version of “a store on every corner,” with programs and projects dispersed across the world. And we have a lot of big successes in our history. But complacency, over time, equals obsolescence.  

Organizations that don’t adapt, don’t survive. Borders. Kodak. Blockbuster. They all seemed like unstoppable juggernauts. But the last twenty years have been a time of immense disruption.  

These businesses didn’t think their customers had other options; they felt impervious to competition. But they were wrong. Our customers also face options of aid from different countries and players, and not all of them function with the same motivations as we do.  

We live in a time of unprecedented “purpose,” with more genius and talent being drawn to work that ‘makes a difference.’ And we live in an age of innovation, which brings huge potential. If we can shift our mentality and our programming to demand-driven development, shaped by customer-determined value, we are on the road to self-reliance.  And our pivotal moments won't be the shuttering of doors, but rather celebrations of strategic transitions and new relationships. 

We are in an industry that is greatly shaped and influenced by “expert bias.” It is a delicate walk between knowing what is good for people and responding to prioritized needs of customers, who may have incomplete exposure to the full ecosystem of choices and resources that can influence and improve their choices and lives. We need to err on the side of empowerment, not expert.  

The shift to ‘customer’ will require us to measure impact differently. It will no longer be enough for an organization to simply have confidence in an audit. Instead, metrics will need to demonstrate customer value and user adoption. We need a holistic look at how a country or sector is advancing, while ensuring those metrics are complemented by customer data and feedback to help us understand whether the impact will be sustained by the people themselves.  

It is for these reasons that I am excited about the topic of “customer-centricity.” The contributors in this issue highlight how organizations, in some cases their own, are making the intentional transition from a “beneficiary” to “customer” mind-set. Through their stories and interviews, we meet each of them where they are at on that journey. I believe this psychological shift is potentially one of the most powerful paradigm shifts our industry is facing, and if we make it successfully, individual’s lives can be changed – on their own terms.