Increasing Customer Centricity 

4 Min. Read

Many organisations we work with want to be more customer centric, and need to be to deliver the growth they seek. But despite well-intentioned initiatives, increasing customer centricity remains stubbornly hard to do. Read on to discover some tips on how to enhance customer centricity in your culture. 

First, we need to get clear on what we mean by customer centricity, before looking at why it’s important, the challenges organisations are facing with it, and ways you can build a customer-centric culture in your business.  

What is customer centricity? 

Our definition of customer centricity is when every single person in your organisation is thinking, taking decisions, and acting through the lens of your external customer. In practice, it’s considering the direct and indirect impact of everything you do – from product/service ideation to sustainability programmes – on the customer. 

Unfortunately, customer centricity has become a buzzword, and phrases like ‘Putting the customer at the heart of what we do’ have become overused. Organisations who really are customer centric have one crucial question at the centre of their operations – 

‘What problem/s are we solving for our customer?’ – and they design their business, products, and services to solve these problems.   

What does it mean to be customer-centric? 

Customer centricity, then, is not a programme or project, but a mindset, beliefs, and behaviours, which include:  

1. Putting yourself in your customer’s shoes 

Spend time with customers from the point of view of what can you learn from them, and feel how they experience your business. This will help you better understand what they are trying to achieve, their frustrations and pain points of doing business with you, and what would make the biggest difference for them. All of which gives you a far more accurate view of what they need, and helps you avoid making incorrect and potentially dangerous assumptions.  

2. Anticipating needs and problems 

Spending time with customers and getting a proper understanding of their needs and challenges enables you to anticipate, be proactive, and get ahead of them, which is critical to delivering a great customer experience.   

3. Be curious.  

Even if you can’t physically spend time with customers, make sure you’re asking lots of questions on a continual basis. It could be surveys, focus groups, it doesn’t matter – the key is to make this an ongoing discipline and practice.  

4. Constantly talking about customers.  

Organisations which are customer centric are always talking about the customer – in meetings, casual interactions, marketing activities. You can feel the customer presence in everything they do, while by contrast in some companies you rarely, if ever, hear mention of the customer. We experience this when we conduct culture assessments. In customer- centric organisations, teams speak openly and unprompted about the customer.  

Why is customer centricity important? 

With persistently tough economic conditions and the relentless pace of change, being customer centric is the only way organisations can stand a chance of surviving, let alone thriving. Increasing customer centricity drives many obvious business benefits, for example:

Seamless customer experience 

You want your customers to have a frictionless and fantastic experience from you. The best way to achieve that is to have every part of your organisation focused on delivering exceptional customer service. We live in a hyper-competitive market, and in most situations, customers have choices, and their expectations are rising all the time.  

Staying relevant to customers 

Being customer centric makes you faster to anticipate and respond, which helps you keep up to date and relevant to customers in an endlessly evolving world.  

Delivery of business strategy 

And of course, companies live or die based on how well they service customers. If you aren’t customer centric then sooner or later those customers will leave, you won’t achieve your objectives, and your business will be in mortal danger. 

Why do companies struggle with customer centricity? 

Despite the obvious business benefits, many companies find customer centricity a challenge. The main reasons for this that we see are:  

1. Thinking in silos.  

People often view customers’ problems from the lens of their function or team, and what they need to deliver. But a customer experiences your organisation as a single entity, so this narrow perspective and silo mentality translates into a fractured and frustrating experience for them.  

2. Overcomplicating.  

Front line employees need your systems, processes, and operations to be as simple as possible so they can dedicate their time to serving customers. We see a lot of unnecessary complexity, where organisations have overburdened these people with what they may need in Head Office, rather than what the customer in front of them needs.  

3. Too far removed. 

In larger organisations with big support functions, the customer can be seen as someone internal – senior leaders, another function etc – rather than external. In organisations with high levels of customer centricity, these departments always think of how the work they’re doing impacts the end customer, but this is far from the norm.  

How to develop a customer-centric culture 

As I mentioned earlier, customer centricity is a mindset, beliefs, and behaviours. Therefore, it’s a culture, and to change your culture to become more customer centric you need to focus on understanding what’s currently preventing customer centricity. This means examining your organisational behaviours and the beliefs behind them. For example, is there a lack of empowerment, so people closest to the customer don’t feel they can make decisions, flag issues, or fix problems?  

Once you’ve done this, it’s about looking at implementing new, more customer-centric behaviours, systems, and symbols. Let’s take each in turn.  

Implement new behaviours  

Based on your diagnosis, you can identify what behaviours need to change. It could be that you need to increase customer empathy, or maybe it’s humility, where you need people to be viewing feedback as an opportunity to deliver even better customer experiences. Whatever it is, you need to start first with codifying what these behaviours mean to your organisation, and have leaders actively role modelling them (for example, talking about customer attraction, retention, satisfaction etc at every opportunity they can).  

Implement new systems  

How do you need to reconfigure your processes, or bring in new ones, to support customer centricity? So, a common one is performance management. If you really want to have customer centricity as a core pillar of your culture, then you can redesign it to include goals that overtly reward customer-oriented behaviours. And for customer-facing processes – how can they be as easy to use as possible; what can you simplify?  

Implement new symbols  

How much time do your leaders spend talking directly with customers? Meeting with them, listening in on calls, resolving their issues, and removing barriers for customer-facing colleagues? And how much time do they seek customer feedback and share that internally? Many organisations reshape the agendas at town halls to show that customers really are key; sharing customer stories or even bringing customers into the meeting for panel discussions etc. It’s a quick and relatively easy thing to do and yet it sends a powerful message. Even if your leaders can’t be with customers physically a lot of the time, how are they staying connected to colleagues who are, and ensuring they’re asking the right questions to understand customer needs? All of these are symbols that demonstrate your culture is customer centric.  

Ensuring your culture strategy is customer-centric 

If an organisation’s culture is customer-centric, it is easily evident. Here are some of the main markers:  

1.  Customer orientation  

This means rather than doing what you think may be right, or what serves you, you focus only on what customers need, and build everything you do around them.   

2.  Holistic view of how your organisation serves the customer 

In these companies, the various teams consider not just how they interact with the customer, but how their interaction connects to and impacts the other interactions the customer has.  

3. High levels of accountability 

People deliver what they say they will, as they understand the implications for the customer if they don’t. As a result, customers do not get passed around from pillar to post (as we’ve all experienced). 

4. Strong degrees of customer empathy 

Building close relationships with customers, understanding their world, and being invested in their success, beyond simply a transaction. There is pride and passion in delivering an exceptional customer experience.  

5. Innovation based on customer need vs. current capacity 

Customer-centric companies start by asking, what does the customer need, and how do we innovate and/or recalibrate our resources to deliver that? We’re so often constrained by our perception of our current resources; it inhibits our ability to think creatively. 

6.. Humility and curiosity 

Being customer centric and endlessly curious means, you never assume you know best, or better, than your customers. You thrive on customer feedback, good and bad, and use it as a source for ideas and continuous improvement.  

As global market pressures persist, customer centricity is only going to grow in importance. But articulating a desire to be more customer centric in your business strategy isn’t enough. It’s essential that you build the right supportive culture and are clear on the specific behaviours you need that underpin all successful efforts to increase customer centricity.   

Get in touch to define your customer centric culture and transform it today. We can use our consumer industry expertise to help reach your goals and drive customer loyalty.