Understand the definition of customer-centric
Customer-centric refers to a business culture that puts customers first. A customer-centered organization:
- Understands their customers’ needs and values and tailors products and services to them
- Makes the customers the focal point of policy and procedures
- Strives to deliver exceptional customer service with every interaction
- Works quickly to resolve customer issues
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Considers customer satisfaction and loyalty as key determiners of success
Take a customer-centric approach to hiring
Most people can learn to deliver great quality service, but hiring people who already have the makings of a customer-centric mindset will benefit your company. To make customer-centricity a part of the hiring process:
- Make your advertisements customer-focused. When creating job postings, describe your company’s commitment to customer service early in the text, and identify how the role contributes to the customer experience. Outline what responsibilities the role has to help your company deliver outstanding service. Job seekers who view customers as adversaries, rather than advocates, will be less likely to apply for an opening described in this way.
- Add the human factor to the decision-making process. Go beyond qualifications when considering candidates. In a customer-centric organization, a quality candidate may be the one who has less work experience but demonstrates a stronger commitment to customer service.
- Place value on soft skills. Communication, listening and collaboration skills are important for a customer-centric approach. As you rank candidates, make sure to give weight to candidates who show evidence of these crucial soft skills.
- Focus on customer service from day one. In a customer-centric company, customer care should be a key focus of the onboarding process. Not only should new employees learn about your customer service strategy and standards, but they should also see proof of your commitment to customer care in trainers, mentors and management.
Read more: Onboarding Guide
Experience your business like a customer
Walking in your ideal customer’s shoes can provide valuable insight into where your company’s customer service succeeds and where it falls short. Creating customer journey maps allows every member of your team to experience your company from a customer’s standpoint. Create your first one by:
- Coming up with a scenario. Write a short scenario that describes a potential customer interaction. For example, a customer needs a cake for a special occasion and checks out your website.
- Establishing the customer’s expectations. Determine what the customer expects. For example, the customer expects to quickly and easily see what options are available and for what price, to be able to order and pay online and to find out how and when to pick up the cake.
- Tracing the employee’s interaction. Follow the steps that the customer will take while keeping their expectations in mind. In this example, you would start at the home page and then recreate each click a customer might take.
- Identifying challenges. During each step, identify any challenges that a customer may experience. For example, you may realize that it’s difficult for the customer to figure out where to go from the home page and your cake descriptions are lackluster.
- Compiling a list of opportunities. Make a list of all the opportunities for improving the customer experience during the interaction. Opportunities for this example may be redesigning the layout of your site and writing new website content.
- Assigning ownership of improvements. Determine who will take ownership of each opportunity.
By compiling customer journey maps for a wide range of scenarios, you can identify any areas of potential improvement.
Make customer service part of everyone’s job description
In a customer-centric organization, every employee is responsible for customer service, even those who don’t have direct contact with your customers. Rewrite every job description at your company from a customer service perspective. Identify how the role influences the customer experience. Set measurable customer service goals for every position, and have supervisors coach with them in mind.
For example, your internal help desk doesn’t talk to customers, but they resolve technical problems for your customer service team. When they fail to deliver timely fixes, customer service reps may be unable to continue assisting customers, leading to long wait times. You can include resolving issues for staff members in a timely manner to ensure that customers receive prompt service in the job description.
A new goal may be to handle 80% of all tickets from customer service reps within 30 minutes. Supervisors would then train and coach help desk technicians with this metric in mind. If a rep only manages to handle 50% of tickets within the time frame, their supervisor may work with them to improve their time management or retrain them on aspects of the system that are slowing them down.
Read more: Coaching for Performance: ‘Must Haves’ for Every Supervisor
Invest in CRM
Customer relationship management (CRM) allows you to manage all of your customer data in one place. As a result, customers enjoy a more streamlined experience, and your employees find it easier to deliver great service. Some specific ways that CRM benefits customers and employees include:
- Automating certain aspects of the customer experience, such as sending a thank you email after a purchase
- Providing all customer information to every member of your team. CRM can link your email, sales, customer service, social media and other software, soemployees have access to a customer’s full story with just a few clicks
- Managing leads to ensure potential customers are contacted quickly
- Identifying relationship-building opportunities, which can remind employees to contact customers periodically to maintain the relationship
- Analyzing metrics, which can run detailed reports to track various data points, allowing you to assess the effectiveness of your customer service strategy
Read more: Selecting a CRM for Your Small Business: Key Criteria
Market from a customer-centric mindset
Marketing is how you reach prospective customers and continuously communicate with your existing ones. If your marketing strategy doesn’t focus on putting the customer first, you can’t truly become a customer-centric organization.
Overall, your marketing efforts should focus on advocating for, educating and empathizing with your customers, rather than trying to sell to them. Every message should speak directly to the customer and show that you understand what’s important to them. Fostering that type of connection will naturally lead to sales.
Some ways that you can make marketing more customer-centric include:
- Conducting research to get to know your ideal customer and developing highly detailed customer personas based on the information gathered
- Adopting a brand voice that speaks the way your customers wish to be spoken to
- Sending inclusive messages that show your company welcomes and respects everyone
- Communicating the value that you provide during every interaction
- Personalizing the customer experience as much as possible
- Creating relevant, informative content that is useful to customers
- Responding quickly to customers across all communication channels, including social media, email, phone messages, in-app messages, Facebook Messenger messages and message boards
Assess your performance with customer feedback
Soliciting customer feedback allows you to identify more opportunities for improvement and see where your organization has succeeded. Some ways that you can solicit feedback include:
- Conducting surveys. Using CRM, you can send a link to a survey and ask customers to rate the service they received after every contact. Encourage participation by offering an incentive to participate. You could provide a discount for a future service or enter survey respondents into drawings for prizes.
- Monitoring online reviews. If you allow customers to review products on your website, review feedback daily. Monitor Facebook reviews and third-party review sites, such as Yelp and Google. Become familiar with sites that provide reviews for businesses in your industry and track reviews there, too. When possible, reply to negative reviews with an apology and a potential solution.
- Contacting customers by phone. In the age of the Internet, a phone call from a company that doesn’t involve a sales pitch can be meaningful to customers. During the call, ask how the customer is doing. Listen to the responses, and look for opportunities where you can be of help. Ask about their experience with your product or service, and be prepared to provide solutions to any problems. Compile a list of feedback and use it to reshape your policies and procedures to deliver better service.
Recognize outstanding service
If customers are your top priority, employees who go above and beyond to meet their needs deserve recognition. Develop a robust employee recognition program to acknowledge and reward exceptional service. Recognizing outstanding service provides positive reinforcement for those who are acknowledged and encourages the rest of your team to approach their daily tasks from a customer-centric mindset.
To identify employees who deserve recognition, use customer feedback, recommendations from peers and supervisors and analyzed metrics. Don’t limit the program to employees who have contact with customers.If you’ve made customer service a part of every job description, any employee who goes above and beyond to benefit customers directly or indirectly should be eligible for recognition.
To go back to an earlier example, a help desk technician who handles 100% of requests within 30 minutes for an entire year could be someone you recognize.
Read more: 7 Examples of Employee Recognition Programs to Try
Customer-centric approach FAQs
What are some reasons companies become customer-centric?
Companies become customer-centric to reap the many benefits of the approach, which may include:
- Better brand image
- Enhanced differentiation from competitors
- Improved customer retention
- Increased profitability
- Potential for word-of-mouth growth
- Avoidance of negative press
Why are customer-centric companies more profitable?
Winning the business of a new customer costs more than keeping the business of an existing one. Being customer-centric can greatly improve customer retention to reduce customer acquisition costs. Plus, customer-centricity leads to more satisfied customers who may recommend the company to other potential customers or post positively about it on social media. Steady word-of-mouth marketing provides companies with a steady stream of new customers that costs nothing beyond the expense of acquiring the first customer, further improving profitability.
Is customer-centric a skill?
Being customer-centric is a mindset. Anyone can focus on becoming more customer-centric when completing their daily tasks in the workplace. However, some people have traits that make it easier to be more focused on the customer, such as strong listening skills, a sense of empathy and high-level communication skills.