Take These 5 Steps to Create a Customer-Centric Culture at Your Brand

Building a customer-centric culture helps your brand stand out by offering an exceptional customer experience.

Is your brand or company customer-centric? If not, you’re not reaping the benefits of a customer-centric culture to create an exceptional customer experience.

A culture of customer centricity refers to a set of beliefs, ideas, and values that places the customer at the center of everything an organization does, according to customer experience technology provider Hiver.

“[Customer centricity] is a strategy and a culture of doing business that focuses on creating the best experience for the customer both at the point of sale and after the sale in order to drive profit and gain a competitive advantage,” says Hiver.

Engaged employees who carry out the brand’s vision for providing a superior customer experience are at the heart of having a customer-centric culture.

“Focusing on culture as a primary means to strengthen customer centricity may seem counterintuitive,” says business strategy resource McKinsey & Company. “But it is employees who interact with customers, hear their concerns first, and observe what delights them before these signals ever form an identifiable, trackable data pattern in a company’s systems. A healthy organizational environment for employees thus directly affects customers.”

Research shows that customer-centric organizations utilize behaviors that distinguish them from companies with lower net promoter scores (NPSs), according to McKinsey & Company.

“In a world where business models are quickly replicated, culture can be the ultimate competitive advantage. Yet ‘culture’ is hardly a managerial formula,” says McKinsey & Company.  “Depending on their strategic goals, organizations have many options for shaping a culture that informs behaviors which, in tactical execution, become a distinctive customer experience.”

Are you ready to build a customer-centric culture at your brand? If so, here are five tips to help you get started.

1. Create and maintain a customer-centric philosophy

“As cliche as it sounds, customer-centricity needs to be part of your company philosophy, values, and mission statement, first and foremost,” says Hiver. “It needs to address your values towards both your internal and external customers. “Envisioning the kind of company you want to be sets the tone for how you’d serve your customers.”

2. Hire for customer success

“Employees are the front-facing workforce that will shape many of the experiences with customers,” according to customer experience technology provider SuperOffice. “Regardless of role, focus on hiring talent that can be aligned with customer-centric thinking and the importance of customer experience at your business.”

3. Pay attention to customer feedback

To cater to your customers’ needs, you must first know what they are, says Hive. Compiling a comprehensive customer feedback collection and utilizing analysis strategy can help your brand in the following ways, according to Hive:

• Stay on top of evolving customer needs and expectations
• Identify and correct internal bottlenecks that negative affect the customer experience
• Proactively identity disgruntled customers so you can turn the situation around
• Gain a holistic understanding of customer sentiment towards your brand

“Surveying your customers is only one part of the process,” says Hive. How you leverage the data you collect is what helps bridge the gap between your company and what your customers want.”

4. Connect company culture with customer outcomes

“Employees will be motivated by a customer-centricity strategy when actions can be linked to results,” says SuperOffice. “For example, strategies to reduce customer wait times or making transitions easier for a customer can be captured in real-time to highlight successful strategy implementation.”

5. Offer seamless collaboration among teams and departments

For a customer-centric philosophy to lead to happy customers and higher revenue, it must be practiced across all teams and departments, not the support department alone, to create the best possible customer experience, says Hive:

“By uniting established leaders from each group into a change coalition, the ‘us vs. them’   mentality is eliminated. It becomes possible to view the organization from the lens of the customer and make far better decisions collaboratively.

“This group can guide a number of transformational activities, including centralizing Voice of Customer insights, journey mapping, and bonding the organization together around a common language of change management.”