Dive Into a Customer-Centric Culture
Published on November 30, 2021 Reading Time: 3 mins
Creating a customer-centric culture within your organisation lays the foundation for any customer experience initiative. Tackling such an initiative on multiple fronts is often the best way to success.
Say your organisation is a ship, battling the ocean currents. Think of a customer-centric culture as the anchor that has the power to hold you in place, keeping you secure.
Put simply, customers want to feel seen, heard, and supported. Adopting a customer centric mindset within your organisation ensures that this happens, cultivating a more positive perception from them. This concept boils down to putting customers at the core of every aspect of operations and adopting some strategies and values to achieve successful customer-centricity.
Improving Customer-Centric Culture
The following strategies and practices will help you tackle the complex waves of customer service, and build a successful customer-centric culture.
- Appointing a Chief Customer Officer (CCO) or Chief Experience Officer (CXO)
This perspective takes a top-down approach to cultivating a customer-centric culture through effective CX leadership, whereby positions such as the CCO, CXO or their equivalents support many of the processes required to achieve this. For example, consistent and seamless customer experience can never be achieved if departments work in silos. The CCO and CXOs job is to facilitate cross functional collaboration between all departments and ensure they are unified. Moreover, these roles serve to assimilate and propagate the voice of the customer throughout the organisation through meetings, storytelling, and similar practices, to ensure relationships are maintained and strengthened.
- Accountability
Organisations should truly be accountable to what customers say and involve them in decision making. Customer’s viewpoints and opinions can help initiate product development, making them feel as an integral part of the process. Furthermore, everyone within the organisation is accountable for improving the customer experience. This can be reinforced by increasing the collaboration between customer experience leaders and other departments. As an example, customer-centric training should not be limited to customer service or sales staff, but should be delivered to all employees of all departments.
- Empowering Employees
Having employees understand the concept of customer-centricity is not enough. It must be strengthened by granting powers and trusting employees in making decisions that are in the interest of the customer, as well as encouraging them to provide suggestions, ideas and solutions. This can be done in addition to reinforcing the right employee behaviours though incentive programs.
- Hiring for Customer-Centricity
Consider hiring employees who already adopt your strategy and vision, by asking candidates during the interview about their customer orientation regardless of their roles. Some individuals will intrinsically share the abilities, traits, and skills specifically required by your organisation, so keep on the lookout!
- Providing Access to Customer Feedback
Involve all employees in understanding customers, their requirements, insights and feedback, by giving free access to the customer databases and allowing them to participate in the analysis and decision-making process.
There you have it; customer centricity is one of the few win-win policies that organisations can adopt. It helps keep your business afloat, whilst maintaining customer loyalty and satisfaction.
Getting the right customer-centric culture, that is conductive of an organisation’s customer experience journey, has massive benefits, the most important of which is building a successful relationship with customers as a result of putting them at the foundation of every organisational decision and consideration.
