The Path to Becoming a Customer-Centric Organization

“My definition of customer-centricity is considering the customer at the center of everything a business does,” said Jeannie Walters, CCXP, CEO of Experience Investigators. “This may seem obvious, but most businesses are product-centric and/or brand-centric. Putting the customer at the center of decisions means understanding their needs, desires, expectations, and disappointments. To do this successfully, however, the organization needs to define what success looks like for both the customer and the organization.”

What Are Some Examples of Customer-Centricity?

Walters said she loves when she sees brands that consider the real needs of a customer, outside of their transactional purchase. For example, a local toy store provides gift wrapping and “elf” services so busy parents can leave Christmas gifts at the store until Christmas Eve. “It’s meeting a real need — hiding the gifts until the time is right — and providing a service customers appreciate,” Walters said.

Franz said providing hard examples is challenging because being customer-centric is truly a way of doing business, a way of being. “It’s strategic,” Franz added. “It’s proactive. It’s co-creation. It’s long-term. It’s relationships. It’s omnichannel. It’s enterprise-wide; it’s not simply individual heroic efforts. And it’s a culture that is deliberately designed to be this way.”

Customer-centricity flows through the veins of the organization and into everything every employee does, according to Franz, and not just if or when a customer is in front of her.

What Are Some Challenges of Being Customer-Centric?

Stephanie Thum, CCXP, founding principal at Practical CX, said look no further than the government’s effort to produce great CX in discovering the challenges to being customer-centric. “Every government agency has a delicate balance to strike between the regulatory realities of being a government organization and the needs and expectations of customers,” she said. “The two aren’t always in sync.”

According to Franz, some other challenges to becoming customer-centric include:

• Not deliberately designing a customer-centric culture and making customer-centricity the foundation of the business
• Assuming that it’s tactical, that it’s what this department does or how a message is sent, without having it woven through the fabric of the business
• Assuming that it’s the same thing as being customer-focused. It is not, Franz said.

Developing products can take months or even years, Walters said, and if a product team is following a roadmap, it’s hard to put on the brakes and say, “but now customers want THIS.” “But that can happen if an organization is being truly customer-centric,” she added. “And if success isn’t defined well, it’s easy to feel like priorities shift a lot. That’s why understanding what success looks like, and how to measure it, is so important.”

The Advantages of Being Customer-Centric

Customer-Centric Businesses Have Customers Who Feel Recognized: In a customer-centric organization, customers feel seen and recognized, and often get more personalized experiences they want to share, according to Walters. Warby Parker changed the eye care industry by focusing on customer and providing a better experience for them. Their customers told others, and it grew from there. “The same can be said about all the other experience-driven disrupters of the last two decades,” Walters added. “They centered the customer at the heart of their decision-making and created shareable experiences, instead of producing products first and looking for customers.”

When the business is customer-centric, customers feel it, Franz added. They know they matter; they know you listen; they see how you solve problems and deliver value. When you deliver value for customers, you also create value for the business. When this happens, you are on the road to building longer-term relationships with your customers, she said.

Customer-Centric Businesses Value Consistency: Customer-centric businesses also value consistency and delivering consistently. Customers know what to expect from these businesses because they have heard the brand promise and have experienced it. Consistency also builds trust, which is a solid foundation for any relationship, according to Franz.

Customer-Centric Businesses Value Innovation: Innovation is another benefit of customer-centric businesses, Franz said. This benefit bridges the business and the human sides of this story. Customers provide feedback. Businesses listen, co-create and innovate to solve customer problems.

Customer-Centric Businesses See Growth: When you innovate to solve for unfulfilled needs and other problems, you are bound to attract potential/future customers who didn’t even know they had these problems to solve — or for whom these problems appear at a later time, Franz said. New problems solved means new customers and that equals growth.

According to Franz, other benefits of becoming customer-centric include:

• Increased retention and CLV: Customers want to continue to do business with brands that listen to them, care about them, solve their problems, and create value for them
• Increased loyalty: Not only do customers stay, but they buy more, spend more, etc.; customer-centric organizations focus on journeys, not just on touch points, which means that they focus on relationships, not transactions.
• Increased referrals: All of that customer love leads to a supplemental marketing and sales force (your customers) that can’t wait to advocate for your brand.
• Reduced costs: When brands listen to customers and use that feedback to make improvements, they realize operational efficiencies through process improvements and more.
• Increased revenue: It’s easier to sell products when they solve problems for your customers, and they solve problems because you took the time to understand customers.

How to Become Customer-Centric

In our experience, adequately addressing this challenge requires a dedicated effort on three levels.

1. First, a customer-centric leadership structure must ultimately report to the chief executive. It should be designed to stimulate cross-silo activity and collaboration.
2. Second, leaders must commit to serving as role models to deliver customer-experience goals to frontline workers. They must refine and reinforce those goals over the long term.
3. Finally, having the correct metrics and incentives is critical for aligning typically siloed units into effective cross-functional teams.

Executive Oversight at Customer-centric Organizations

As customer satisfaction is a top priority, your customer experience team requires executive-level influence to navigate an ever-changing political and social climate. You can no longer concentrate the responsibility on a single division. In a customer-centric organization, every division must work towards offering positive customer experiences. With that level of integration, the chief executive must directly lead the customer-experience initiatives.

Let’s imagine a company with a customer journey map that has the following silos: marketing, sales, operations, and technical support. The marketing team creates the leads. The sales team makes the sale. The operations team keeps things running. The technical support follows up on any issues. Nothing new there.

Now, let’s see how these teams affect the buyer’s journey. The marketing and sales teams are pretty easy to relate to conversion. Marketing draws them in, sales seal the conversion. But what about the other two. Operations and technical support are still part of the buyer’s journey and thus the mapping.

The operations team keeps things running smoothly so that the customer rarely experiences an issue. This leaves them with a positive experience of the brand, product, or service. This positive view may lead them to stick around and recommend the brand to others (free lead generation!).

The technical support team also serves an essential role in the customer experience. They are the ones who provide solutions that solve the customer’s questions, issues, or required product/service upgrades. This is an opportune time for the company to provide technical sales, cross-sell, or consulting to the client. That’s a lead generated from an already existing customer.

Now, in a typical organizational structure, each of these silos would report to a different executive. The strategies employed by each silo would be separate.

Modeling and Reinforcing Customer Customization and Personalization

Within a customer-centered organization, leadership must exemplify the behaviors they want to see in employees. Creating a positive customer experience takes the whole team working like a well-oiled machine.

Frontline workers, in the trenches, can easily lose sight of the company’s goals and initiatives without regular reinforcement. They are preoccupied with providing assistance or services in a timely, cost-effective, and efficient manner. And these are all essential pieces of the customer journey. However, leadership has a bird’s eye view of the customer lifecycle and can provide the scaffolding needed to keep customer-experience goals in the forefront.

This could be as simple as addressing customer questions or concerns in a timely manner. A leader who is not willing to put aside some of their own duties or spend their own time for customer needs demonstrates to employees that they don’t need to either.

On the other hand, if an employee asks their superior for help on a customer issue, the superior could put aside some of their other duties in order to address the issue promptly. The customer lifecycle includes not only the things the customer sees or the words they hear but also the time required to meet their needs. Having a leader who is willing to be inconvenienced by a customer’s need demonstrates to the employee what customer-centric is all about and how important the customer experience really is to the company.

Each goal your company sets for improving the buyer’s journey needs to start with modeling and reinforcement by leadership, in order to keep a consistent message and strategy. This might mean providing training, workshops, or coaching for leaders as they implement new strategies.

Evaluating and Incentivizing Personalized Customer Experiences

As part of the customer life cycle management process, you must establish metrics and incentives. These are the driving forces behind adapting and improving your customer journey mapping.

Customer Customization and Personalization Metrics

Metrics ensure that goals are being met. The metrics you choose will depend on what you know about your customers, what strategies have worked in the past, and your company goals.

Not sure where to start? According to Forbes, these are the best metrics to use for customer experience initiatives:

• Net Promoter Score
• Sales
• Customer Loyalty
• Customer Engagement
• Customer Retention
• Employee Satisfaction
• Customer Effort Score
• Customer Acquisition
• Customer Lifetime Value
• Customer Satisfaction
• Churn Rate
• Average Time Resolution
• First Contact Resolution
• Visitor Intent
• Task Completion
• Stock Price
• Contact Volume by Channel
• Social Listening
• Referral Rate
• Cart Abandonment Rate

Final Thoughts on Becoming Customer-Centric

In order to become a customer-centered organization, an organization must:

• have executive leadership that promotes cross-silo activities related to the customer experience
• have leaders committed to modeling behaviors that deliver customer-experience goals to frontline workers
• and have the correct metrics and incentives for optimizing the customer lifecycle