A business needs to understand their customers to be able to bring out products and services best suited for them.
Most businesses are product-focused, sales-driven and only consider customers as important when it comes to marketing.
To achieve a customer-centric culture both the employers and employees have to be on board for it to work out.
Here are 5 tips on how to achieve a customer-centric culture:
- Put customer empathy first:
Customer empathy is the ability to identify a customer’s emotional need, understanding the reasons behind it and responding appropriately. This is about gathering information, user interviews, creating personas, trying to find out who you are making the service for. Empathy drives innovative solutions, one has to do the right research so as not solve the wrong problem.
If you do not know your customers, whatever experience you have for them will be wrong. Empathy helps in crafting the right experience for your customer. There is the misconception that empathy is about feeling what the customer is feeling, it is about understanding.
- Hire people who are customer oriented:
At the first point of contact with prospective employees, organizations should make thinking about customers and their needs a priority. During the interview, hiring managers should ask candidates irrespective of the roles, questions to ascertain their customer orientation. This helps you to know if they have customer-centric thinking and ensures everyone is on the same page on the importance of customer experience at the company.
- Make customer insights available:
The employees have to understand the organization’s customers to be able to make the services that meet their needs. There are systems or softwares in place that allows access to customer insights for all employees instead of just granting access to only the sales and marketing departments. This will aid the departments in working together seamlessly to create amazing products/services that address customer’s pain points.
- Employees should be able to interact directly with customers:
Businesses need to create avenues where employees can interact directly with the customers, this way the employees get a better sense of what the customers needs are either through focus groups, support calls, customer visits.
- The link between employee culture and customer impact should be tracked:
If one cannot track whatever is done, one will not be motivated to continue. If the employees know how the results of customer-centric culture affects the company, they would want to be more involved.
This involves getting the customers involved in the reward system, everyone will be motivated to work towards the same goal as they see that they are part of the system working towards creating a special experience for the customers.
A customer-centric culture can boost the business revenue and customer retention rate. Checks and balances should therefore be put in place, where everyone involved in the customer-centric culture of the business will be held accountable.