When you ask your customers, would they agree that your company customer centric?  Or is it just on your shiny fancy marketing materials and believe what you keep on telling yourselves.

 Becoming customer centric is not easy.  There is so much customer data that organizations could get their hands on but unless you are set up for it, your organization will not be doing anything with these troves of valuable information.  Customer centricity is about personalized communications and experiences and you having the right processes in place to enable this.

To achieve all this, your organization must live and breathe a customer-centric culture.  Not only your frontlines and marketing department but your entire organization has to be engaged and see how they play a part in customer centricity.  A lot of organizations work in silos and they even have their unique functional scorecards to prove it!

 1.     Ingrain customer empathy into your mode operation.

a.     Especially during these turbulent times, work empathy into your processes and customer touchpoints to remain competitive because that is what customers have always needed and need at this time.

b.     Take the time to listen to understand your customer’s emotional need and then acknowledge your customers so that they feel understood and assured that you will be able to respond accordingly to fulfill their need.  It is important to focus on a balance of the speed of interaction and taking the time to optimally serve your customer.

c.     Take a close look at your processes and policies to ensure that it is driving the right behaviors towards a positive customer experience instead of encouraging employees to cut corners.

d.     Forget cut and paste of canned responses when a customer is wanting to be heard.

e.     Have a holistic view of the customer so that you could provide a personalized experience.

2.     Hire service champions

a.     This means looking at your recruiting practices. Sometimes we hire to fill seats if the demand is there.  However, in the long term your organization suffers.  You should always be hiring employees that genuinely love dealing with customers.  Not employees that just want to come to work for a paycheck.  Therefore, it is important to hire to that competency. Make sure customer service is part of the questions in the interview process so that people realize how important it is in your organization.

b.     Gather feedback from your operation to see exactly what type of person they are looking for.  Involve them in the interviewing process.  Make them part of the outcome and then measure your success by following up to see how each employee is progressing so that you could tweak your hiring practices if necessary.

3.     Utilize your customer data

a.     Share your customer insights with all your employees on a regular basis.  Sometimes groups gather some great insights into your customers but then it just stays behind closed doors.  Use those great presentations and make it available to team leaders so that they can understand and share the high-level metrics with their people.  Build in processes that would encourage the sharing of these customer insights and presentations through monthly communication, CX brainstorming sessions and town halls.

b.     Use a variety of surveying methodologies to gather what your customers have to say about your organization, products, or services.  The more you understand your customer, the better you will be able to meet their needs.  Customers are willing to give a lot of great feedback if organizations are listening and willing to act.

c.     Encourage and utilize feedback that your frontline workers give. They are having to deal with your customers daily and will have some great insights into your customers.  I have seen a lot of cases where feedback is given but nothing is done with that information.  So, the next time, the frontline employee is not apt to give feedback as they feel it is not being actioned anyway.  A great good practice is to have monthly focus groups with your employees to gather customer feedback.

4.     Take a holistic view of the customer.

a.     Look at every customer touch point and make sure that x-functionally everyone understands how their role and behavior impacts the customer.  Make service a core value of your organization. You should even have non-customer facing employees spend at least half a day a month listening to customer calls or even serving customers if they are able to.  Let some employees attend some weekly, monthly or quarterly reviews, where applicable.  This gives them some great insight into how their decisions impact the customer.

b.     Make every employee in the organization a service champion no matter what their role may be.   You want them vested in improving the customer experience at every phase of the product or service lifecycle. It must be at the forefront of every moment of truth.

c.     Align your hiring, training, process improvement, technology and rewards and recognition to support your customer centric culture. They all must work towards a common goal and vision of the customer.

d.     Spend your time where your customer is.  Whether it be on social, telephony, email or website, your organization must make sure you are adequately supporting that medium in a clear and concise language that your customers understand.  That is why it is important to make sure you are supporting the right channels of communication.

5.     Align your scorecards to customer outcomes

a.     Make sure that your scorecards are aligned to support a customer centric culture.  I have seen scorecards used as a medium to drive behaviors that managers should be managing individually.  Do not dilute the customer experience focus by having to many metrics on your scorecard.

b.     Align your x-functional scorecards to be customer focused.  Everyone should have skin in the game.  I have seen scorecards where organizations seem to be working in silos and they have the differing scorecards to prove it.

 At the end of the day, creating a customer centric culture is a long-term commitment.  It should not be a flavor of the month seen as a one-time thing. Take care of your employees so that they are then enthusiastic about serving your customers.  They should be recognized, trained, coached, supported, and rewarded so that they also continue to raise the bar.

 Your organization’s success is dependent on your customers.  Create a customer centric culture to create raving fans. It is not easy.  It requires a lot of work and focus.  It is quite easy to take the path of least resistance and twist your data so that it shows that you are doing well.  However, this will not last long until your competition does a better job and you start to see your customer churn increase.  It cost about 5X more to acquire a new customer than to keep an existing one.

 There is no short cut. You must take a strategic approach to creating a customer centric culture.  It has been proven time and time again that organizations that truly make customers their number one priority are much more profitable.

 Take that first step, no matter how small it may be.  At least you are taking action to move in the right direction.  If you are better today than you were yesterday, then you have made progress.