You want to create a customer-centric culture in your organization. What’s the first step?

Before defining a vision, the organization must decide to become customer obsessed. You become customer obsessed by putting the customer in the center of everything you do. Whatever business you’re in, you’re successful only because of your customers. This is critical to the success of your business. If your customers disappear, so does your business.

Building a customer centric company / team starts with genuine curiosity and empathy. You need to listen closely and understand customers' and employees' experiences and needs. What kind of problems do they face? What are their (or the industry's) needs? How can you make their lives easier or interactions with your business even better? Gather feedback through as many channels as possible and tap into the experience of your front line team. But dig deeper than surface level metrics to truly understand their perspective. This will give you the actionable insights you need to build an inspiring vision for the future and drive action.

As you define your vision, don't forget to consider context. Your team doesn't benefit from your experience or the conversations you've had. Consider how you can not only communicate the vision but also provide as much context as possible about the WHY of your choices, why it's crucial to not only influence perception but the why behind what you've chosen to pursue.

The first step in creating a customer-centric culture is securing leadership buy-in. Engaging senior management, aligning goals with customer satisfaction metrics, and empowering employees to take ownership of customer experiences are key actions to kickstart the process.

Crafting a customer-centric vision demands a reflective approach - and understanding what it really means to be customer centric. Start by pinpointing your core values, ambitions, and principles around customers. Think about what the idea customer journey with you is. Your success metrics must align with enhancing customer satisfaction and loyalty. Ensure this vision is succinct, mirrors your overarching mission, and is universally understood across your team. Embedding this vision into your culture means everyone is geared towards delivering exceptional customer experiences.

Creating a customer-centric culture begins with a clear vision that guides every decision and action. It's about more than just satisfying customers; it's about anticipating their needs and exceeding their expectations at every touchpoint. By defining a vision centered on delivering exceptional value and experiences, we empower our teams to prioritize customer satisfaction in everything they do. Let's cultivate a culture where the customer is at the heart of every initiative, driving innovation and growth.

It is imperative for businesses to outline a vision for customer centricity that they can aspire to adopt, mainly values that revolve around the customer as the focal point. Goals should be to foster long term relationships, principles should be to continuously receive feedback, connect with your customers, personalize interactions, focus on exceeding expectations, customers feelings & thoughts should be of high net worth. These efforts will ultimately lead to mutual benefit and sustainable growth

Conduct your CX maturity assessment exercise within the organization, whereas the following pivots are to be evaluated and marked with scores: A- Organizational culture B- modust operandi C- customer centricity D- policies & Procedures E- Systems and tools F- CX Governance All of the above and other factorials are to be mapped together in a matrix for defining issues and deciding on the CX program towards a targeted strategic goal ..

Involving your team all the way through the process is absolutely crucial. They have key aluable insights and innovative ideas on how to enhancing engagement with customers and the overall customer experiences. Empowering them to voice their opinions and share their practices ensures a rich pool of knowledge to draw from. Equipping them with the right training, tools and the right resources enables them to be part of the overall customer-centric vision. Cultivating an atmosphere where collaboration, responsibility and constructive feedback are the norm makes every team member an integral part of championing customer focus.

This is great! I'd add that encouraging behaviors of curiosity, reflection, and constant discovery, and allowing all teams time to contribute to this process. Also highlighting contributions from those that do. These produce artifacts like conversations, notes, new data points, collaborations and encourage a heterogeneity of perspective - all from different points in the customer journey. From there, exploring customer maturity models and VoC programs provide a path forward. Often times there's a tendency to fall victim to assumptions, biases, and errors in thinking around the behavior or experiences of clients, their behavior (fundamental attribution, halo, etc). These behaviors challenge and help course correct inaccurate assumptions

It's about involving every member in understanding and championing the customer's perspective. Encouraging open dialogue and feedback loops empowers employees to empathize with customers, driving innovation and solutions tailored to their needs. When every team member feels connected to the customer experience, we can collaboratively shape strategies and processes that prioritize customer satisfaction. Let's empower our teams to be the driving force behind a culture that puts customers first.

Listening to your customers and understanding their needs can help you develop a superior product & deliver superior service. It’s as simple as that period.. It will help you achieve greater benefit in terms of loyalty, more profit with lesser cost. While using metrics to gauge customer satisfaction like NPS, CLV, Customer effort score etc. are helpful but if organizations do not act on the feedback and stay ahead of their customers needs they will fall behind competitors in capturing the market share. If you want to be Number 1, you need to win the hearts and minds of the customer by valuing their input.

The order in this article is all wrong. The FIRST step is to listen to your customers. Conduct research to understand what matters to your current and target customers. This will allow you to define the right vision that matches your model of customer-centricity with what is important to the customers you want to attract and retain. Proactive, always-on customer feedback is important to know that the improvements you are making are resonating and to allow you to pivot and respond to evolving customer needs, but make sure you start moving your organization to an increased level of customer-centricity from a sound fact base of customer insight.

It's about actively engaging with our customers, deeply understanding their feedback, preferences, and challenges. By cultivating avenues for open dialogue, we gain invaluable insights that propel meaningful enhancements throughout our offerings. Whether through surveys, focus groups, or direct conversations, prioritizing customer voices ensures our agility and responsiveness to their evolving needs.

As you innovate and improve, ensure that you fix pain points and stay focused on the moments that matter most to customers - the Moments of Truth. Improving at every touchpoint in the customer journey is not practical nor does it make sense for return on investment and resources. The Moments of Truth are the touchpoints where you can really make a difference and drive outsized impact with customers. This is where improvement efforts should be focused.

Building a customer-centric culture hinges on innovation and continual improvement, with the Customer Success role at the forefront. It's about proactively identifying opportunities to enhance the customer experience, leveraging insights from our dedicated Customer Success teams. By fostering a culture that values collaboration and feedback, we empower our teams to iterate on processes and solutions, ensuring they align with customer needs and expectations.

Center your focus on people: whether is your employees, your partners or your customers! People is what matters, not products, nor processes... Profit is a corollary when you have people giving their best and leveraging collaboration between the three big stakeholders: employees, customers, partners! Culture of collaboration and innovation as opposed to cutthroat race to "efficiency" and maximization of revenues!

Make certain that the C-Suite or Senior Execs are on board. Even if the initiative came from that level (a reason to celebrate in itself), make sure they know what is involved. Make sure that they are willing to walk the talk. They can't say one thing and do another. A company's culture is a direct reflection of its management. If it's a question of "do what I say and not what I do", then you can save yourself a lot of time and effort by going away to think about this again...

It starts at the top, and sometimes even a step above if you have a board to report to. Look at the metrics that you are reporting. Are they company-focused or customer-focused? When your message to your employees focuses solely on company goals and targets, it is hard to claim you are customer-centric. This doesn't mean company goals like GRR, NRR, and profits are unimportant or should be abandoned, but it means you need to ensure you are also addressing customer goals, such as referrals, acts of advocacy, customer effort, and community activity. If you currently measure these aspects, sprinkle them in when speaking to your employees, as it begins with you as a leader to drive a customer-centric culture.

Lead by example. Employees and customers are tired to hear those beautiful stories of how corporates "care" for their customers and employees. Don't tell, act. Do test your own products, do invite customers to cobuild your offerings and influence your roadmap, do collect and act on feedback, do talk to customers. As a leader, only if you show that you personally care would you be able to find inspire others and create this kind of culture.

Creating a CX culture in your organization can improve sales, revenue, customer share of wallet, stickiness and your competitive positioning. A unique, impactful way of doing this is though Secret Shopping (aka: Mystery Shopping, Sales Journey Assessments, CX Assessments). From 'being found' by prospects to 'closing the deal' and post sales, this will give you concrete examples of your Strengths, Differentiators, Challenges & Red Flags - along with Improvement Recommendations. Do this with a professionals with a proven methodology (like us, +700 high tech buying experiences) and Industry Benchmark data. SHARE/DISCUSS results with your employees. Identify resulting change and reward. This should never be a blaming exercise. Only learning.

Creating a culture goes beyond initial strategy and involves embedding a real customer focus across all levels of the company. Key other considerations include leadership endorsement, where leaders actively demonstrate customer centric behaviours and decision-making; employee engagement and training, ensuring all staff understand their role in delivering exceptional customer experiences; organisational alignment around customer needs, with processes and policies designed to prioritise delivering customer value and satisfaction; technology and systems should be leveraged to gather and analyse customer feedback, enabling continuous improvement and personalisation of the customer journey.

É preciso criar um sentimento coletivo onde todos, mesmo as áreas que não tem nenhum contato com o cliente, se sintam responsáveis pelos clientes. Para isso gosto de fazer ativação como programas de Embaixadores de CX e experiência no atendimento, logística, vendas (1 dia com áreas que interagem diretamente com o cliente). Além disso, deixar visível a todos as jornadas experimentadas pelos clientes e as personas, para que todos conheçam os clientes e estejam sempre atentos a oportunidades de facilitar a vida deles tornando a jornada mais fluida.