Seven Top Tips for a Customer-Centric Organisation
It seems these days that everyone is talking about customer centricity – but what does being a customer-centric organisation really mean, and how and where does this impact your business?
If we take a dictionary definition, being customer-centric is all about ‘placing the customer at the heart of your organisation’s marketing effort and focusing on what is important to the customer.’ However, creating a customer centric organisation does not begin and end simply with your marketing approach, but needs to pervade your business and be reflected in the values, beliefs and behaviours exhibited by all your employees. It is not just about how they interact with customers, but how they think about and approach their work. Many organisations talk about being customer-centric, but how many of them or their employees really understand what that means in terms of the desired behaviours at key customer touch-points?
Here are 7 Top Tips about how to create a customer-centric organisation which firmly places the customer experience at the heart of your business operations.
- Start with your company culture. Try and articulate your company’s ‘reason for being’ in a few simple words – your ‘WHY’. Why do you exist, for what reason, and what do you deliver to your customers that others cannot emulate?
- Develop a set of core values by which your company can operate.
- Clearly communicate your ‘WHY’ throughout your organisation and ask each function and individual to think about how this might translate into how they act and deliver services to customers. Embed the desired values and behaviours through active management and frequent communication.
- Talking about your organisation’s values, beliefs and behaviours should not just be a one-off or annual exercise. Invest the time to continually reinforce your values through all your internal communications, and through your management team. After all – this is the way you do business and a daily or weekly reminder to your employees can act as a ‘rallying cry to the troops’ and set a positive and motivational tone for the day / week ahead. Furthermore, by building an assessment of alignment /adherence to organisational values and behaviours into your performance management practices can help you to identify ‘star players’ and potential future leaders who exhibit the desired behaviours, as well as highlighting those individuals who may need additional management support and coaching. Celebrate your Customer-Centric Heroes and share their stories.
- In the same way that the use of Case Studies can help bring your product and service propositions to life for customers, they can be used to illustrate how applying your company values and desired behaviours can positively impact your customers, your organisation and the individual employee. A regular internal communications campaign featuring Customer-Heroes or Value of the Month, using tangible examples can help to reinforce your desired company culture, drive employee motivation and provide a point of reference for the rest of the workforce. Respect and act on customer feedback.
- Feedback from any customer, whether it is positive or negative is a gift – ignore it at your peril as your customer will expect it to be acted upon. Whether that is in improving your overall customer experience; fixing a perceived issue or in the design, development and delivery of new products, services, communications or distribution channels which more accurately meet your customers’ needs. With the proliferation of social media channels and technology which allows your customers to communicate with their networks (and beyond) 24/7 from virtually anywhere in the world, the voice of the customer is louder than ever before. This means businesses that are serious about delighting customers and maintaining brand integrity, need to have in place robust strategies and processes for listening to customer feedback from a multitude of communications channels, and for acting upon that feedback in a timely and appropriate manner. Technology that delivers the experience your customers expect – but don’t forget behaviours, processes and tools.
- The rate of technological change continues to accelerate and impact the way customers expect to be able to communicate and transact with their chosen suppliers and many businesses today are focused on how they can organise or re-organise in order to effectively deliver the omni-channel experience that a diverse set of customer segments requires. Technology, however, cannot be considered or implemented in isolation. Solutions should not solely be designed and developed based on operational or commercial considerations, but with customer insight at the forefront (for example: how do I want to communicate with you; how would I like my services/products delivered; at what point in the customer journey would I prefer human interaction; what is my comfort-level with technology and how many steps am I willing to go through?). This requires a cross-functional approach, whereby your operations, marketing and technology teams work closely together to develop and implement a customer experience, delivered using the right technology, serviced by robust and knowledgeable operations and reflected within your market positioning and communications.
Written by Suzi West
Suzi West is founder of Harley West. She is a business consultant with a background in management, strategy, transformational change and strategic marketing.
Prior to starting Harley West, Suzi held a number of senior roles within global organisations in the fields of Marketing and Change Management. She holds a Masters in Business Administration and certifications in Six Sigma process improvement methodology, Lean Six Sigma and Agile project management.
Suzi is passionate about working collaboratively with business owners, CEOs and their senior management teams to help them drive their business forward in the most effective and efficient way, turning ideas into actions which will deliver real business benefit. https://www.harley-west.com/
