Strategies for Creating a Customer-Centric Company Culture

Investing in customer service improves business results, says research. Quite obviously, a truly customer-centric firm tends to make more profits in the long run. However, a handful of firms are successful at creating a customer-centric culture. Amidst an ever-evolving business space, it’s difficult to survive unless you offer something more than just good products and services. Here comes customer-centricity which is reflected throughout customer lifecycle management.

True client-centricity necessitates a purposeful commitment to ideals that may be different from short-term, cost-cutting measures. Instead they are more aligned with the bottom line.

To create a customer-centric firm, it’s crucial to follow a set of principles — and embed them throughout your entire organization — that prioritize customers in all decisions. It might not result in an instant spike in profit margin, but it will provide you with a long-term benefit — the trust of your customers. And that’s where you win.

It’s not always easy, and it’s not always natural. However, if you succeed, it will have a direct and beneficial impact on your bottom line.

Customer-centricity is focused on every area of your business that directly impacts your customers’ needs and preferences. It’s important to address your customers’ wants and interests from time to time. Whether it is marketing and sales or product development and support, it’s always important to prioritize customers’ wishes for long-term success. No short-term commercial goals help you stay in the game for years.

How Crucial is Customer-Centricity

According to research done in this field, customer-centricity accentuates financial performance and gives your firm a competitive advantage. Here’s some great information about customer-centricity.

• 7 out of 10 Americans believe that it’s not just about the product, rather they are more comfortable doing business with a firm that offers exceptional customer service.
• A 5% increase in client retention raises profitability by more than 25%.
• It costs 5 to 25 times more to gain a new customer than it does to nurture and retain a new one. Consumers in the United States are willing to spend 17% extra to do business with companies who provide exceptional service. To keep up with this trend, many companies are making significant efforts to deliver exceptional customer lifecycle management.

So, what needs to be done to create a successful customer-centric business? What does it take to build a customer-centric organization?

Encourage active listening

Individual employees can create trust with consumers by carefully listening to what they have to say. It’s an integral part of the customer lifecycle management process. Putting the interests of the client first necessitates everyone in the organization developing more empathy. Encourage your support employees to conduct research on the people they are attempting to assist and to study data that will assist them in understanding each customer persona. Knowing more about your consumers will enable personnel to manage requests more effectively, resulting in improved levels of customer satisfaction.

Sync your core values

Whatever way you use to promote customer-centricity, it is critical that your business values connect with the initiative. If your values are well-chosen, they should match the behaviors of your employees and be simple to grasp. Some businesses even go so far as to include customer-centricity as one of their written principles. At least one company value should drive customer-centric behavior.

Hire and train according to the culture

Even with the greatest customer-centric principles and corporate culture, progress is difficult without workers who support your strategy. Hiring personnel based on abilities and experience is always vital, but don’t forget to take attitude into account. When it comes to hiring, making an effort to analyze soft talents related to your customer-centric values can make a big difference. Include these concepts in your staff onboarding and any ongoing training that you provide as another approach to reaffirm your commitment to customer-centricity. This allows you to not only hire exceptional people but also reinforce desired behaviors and best practices throughout time.

Customer satisfaction should be prioritized

Client happiness is a fantastic metric for assessing your company’s capacity to efficiently meet client needs. One daring tactic used by some businesses is to prioritize customer pleasure and commit to doing whatever it takes to ensure client happiness. This will have a significant impact on your work procedures and schedules, but it will also ensure that your efforts are directed at client needs. Shifting your emphasis and prioritizing customer satisfaction can display a strong commitment that your customers will notice. Implementing CRM Software can help you prioritize your customer-centric campaigns, so that you can deliver 100% customer satisfaction at every touchpoint.

Collect customer feedback

Without a continuous flow of customer feedback, it might be difficult to determine whether changes have the desired impact. Don’t forget to construct surveys that provide vital insights into customer happiness and other important indicators as you develop plans to become more customer-centric. Using well-structured surveys that ask the proper questions can provide you with a great baseline. Follow-up surveys at critical touch points along the customer journey allow you to track your success over time. Having CRM Software helps you track customer feedback on a regular basis without much hassle involved in the process.

Directly interact with the Customers

Companies must create opportunities for staff to communicate directly with clients, including in “back office” duties. After all, every employee has an impact on the customer experience, even if only indirectly, so connecting with customers may help every employee better understand them and learn about their accomplishments and issues.

Let’s talk about Airbnb. Airbnb considers hosts, or people who rent out their homes, to be consumers. Therefore, it fosters employee-host relationships by requiring staff to stay in Airbnb rentals when traveling on business. When staff attend meetings at Airbnb offices, they are also asked to allow hosts to stay with them. Furthermore, staff attend an annual event alongside hosts to discuss lessons learned from the previous year and strategies for the coming year.

In the B2B space, this is not always possible. With a high volume of customers to handle on a regular basis, companies often need to rely on technologies like Enterprise CRM for streamlining things.

Last but not least

The old adage “you can’t manage what you don’t measure” also applies to customer centricity. Managers will be motivated and equipped to nurture a customer-centric culture if they know whether and how it affects results, thus organizations should guarantee that the link between culture and customer effect is established and tracked. According to Diane Gherson, IBM’s head of human resources, two-thirds of her company’s customer experience scores are driven by staff engagement. That demonstrates what Gherson and her team intuitively knew: if staff liked their company, clients would, too.

To nurture a customer-centric culture, many companies run compensation programs. Let’s take reference of what Adobe’s Donna Morris said once. She introduced the concept of “giving every employees’ skin in the game.” It’s like every employee, irrespective of their position in the company, has the capability of taking “an element of risk” while serving customers. The objective is to serve customers at any cost irrespective of the consequences it will bring.

The same kind of culture is nurtured by Adobe. Since employees always take their fair-share of risks, the company has developed a compensation programme that is linked to every employee to the consumer. The company’s revenue performance, as well as customer success metrics such as retention, are reflected in the short-term financial incentive plan. The programme not only makes tangible the contributions that each employee contributes to the customer, but it also results in organizational-wide alignment because everyone is working towards the same goals.