A customer-centric mindset is becoming increasingly important in today’s age of the customer, when organizations are undergoing a digital transformation to manage customer experience and corporate positioning.
By gathering customer insights from multiple sources, organizations can identify their most valuable customers, build nurturing relationships with them and ensure profits for the future.
What is customer-centricity?
Customer-centricity is a way of doing business that fosters a positive customer experience at every stage of the customer journey.
Although a self-explanatory concept, putting it to practice means providing an exceptional experience to each customer right at the point of sale, at their first interaction with the product/ service; going all the way to the after sale.
Putting your customer first builds a sense of loyalty and satisfaction which leads to referrals for more customers. Every time a customer-centric organization takes a decision, they do so in the interest of their customers.
Customer centric experience creation must also relate and link employee perceptions and actions to company objectives. This is where we find a sync in the objectives and principles of Total Quality Management and customer-centricity.
Optimising employee productivity towards the task, the brand and product, and focusing on delivering value to customers, addresses the linkage between employee and customer, and thereby TQM.
What is the importance of customer-centricity?
Everyone understands the value of key decisions and the objectives towards which they are working every day. This becomes a reference point to pursue new ideas, upgrades, partnerships, etc. It is important to ask, “Will this help my customer?”, a guiding question which will help build a customer-centric culture around marketing, sales, product, technology and customer service teams.
In order to facilitate a superior experience for customers, you first need to have an in-depth understanding of customer needs, and the structure followed by the company to achieve these goals, through the attitudes and behaviours of their employees.
Organisations must therefore understand and leverage the impact of employees on customer behaviour, through training, rewards, recognition and upskill, providing them with a path to achieve the desired result, which we can also call ‘employee ambassadorship’.
Customer-Centric Best Practices
Studies have shown that customer retention yields better profits than customer acquisition, where an increase in customer retention rates by 5% can lead to a 25%-95% increase in profits. Customer-centric companies are 60% more profitable than companies that are not focused on their customers.
If you want to be customer-centric, then your business needs to make a company-wide commitment to your customer's success using the following processes:
- Use customer data for a better understanding of your target base
- Identify your best customers
- Commit to customer successes
- Design processes and policies from the customer’s viewpoint
- Encourage customer innovation
- Collect feedback and analytics
Activities to identify and retain best customers
- Structure the organization to encourage responsibility and ownership
- Provide channels within the organisation to access customer data and analytics
- Provide incentives to employees to go beyond
- Provide techniques and training to employees to solve problems and find solutions
- Learn best practices from the industry and train employees and teams
- Define a chain of command for customers to escalate and raise issues/ provide feedback
Customer-centricity doesn’t end with marketing efforts, the process continues through the lifetime of the customer with the organisation. And when we do something that benefits our customers, we celebrate that victory as a team.
A win for our customers is a win for our team, is a win for our values and capabilities with TQM.
For more customer-centric solutions for your business, read more: https://www.elgi.com/