Why Customer Centricity is Crucial for Your Business

Customer centricity is not about looking at the customers from the organization perspective. Instead customer centricity is all about looking at organizations through customers eyes. It is all about delving deep into the day to day problems a customer faces and coming up with a solution which will benefits all. Quoting the example of Best Buy – they are pretty involved in conducting customer research and basis the findings are ready to bring structural changes to their daily business operations.

In one of their research, the company learned that women are their customers and these women told that they don’t like installing products by themselves and would prefer to buy a bundle which has all the necessary accessories to install the product. In response to that finding, Best Buy began their bundle offering and bought in a team which would service these customers in installing the product and with technical know-how.

Although this sounds simple, these changes required a lot of planning, organizing, re-organizing, time and effort from the business yet it was worth-while because being customer-centric is the topmost reason why Best Buy is still in the business game.

It is not difficult to see that customer centricity has become an important discussion for various Fortune 500 leaders. Phrases like customer focus, customer driven, or customer first has taken over the mind and body of the organizations by showing up iteratively on vision and mission statement.

Like any transformative change, success requires clarity of vision, strategy to approach and restless implementation. A global transformation often come up as hurdle for many organizations and thus preventing them to be truly customer focus.

Understanding that a change requires vision, strategy and implementation,

Here are a few ways to get started:

Vision for Customer Centricity: The process of creating a customer centric culture is by specifically defining our vision, mission, values and purpose. This will take a lot of thinking, time, effort, creativity from entire team as the purpose is to fine-tune each component. But remember, it’s not the end, it’s just a beginning. To create a vision that sets a legacy for organizations, the commitment should start from top. The c suite level must be on board with the vision so that the entire team can see the vision in action.

Customer Centric Role: In order to oversee the implementation and execution part of the customer centric strategy there must be a role accountable for this, maybe a chief customer officer or customer focus driver or whatever your creative juices create. This person should be an expert in transforming and understanding cross-functional team to drive customer focus vision.

Mission Statement: Each functional head should understand their and their department’s role in driving customer focus vision. They should be aligned to the vision so that they can translate the same to their team members.

Prevent Silos: Asking just your customer success team to be customer driven will not drive the results. It is important that each function or department is customer driven and should reward teams for achieving customer first results.

Customer and their success should be the focal point for any organization. A vision and strategy for customer success and the restless dedication to implement across organizations will impact collective revenues, collaborative innovation, employee satisfaction and therefore customer satisfaction.