For many businesses and industries, COVID-19 has made customer and employee welfare a priority. Witness Michelin-starred restaurants revolving around making food for health care workers and being carried out, or airlines voluntarily forfeiting ticket revenue in the middle seat.
The organizations that lead the customer experience — USAA, Zoom, Netflix, and Apple, for example — are very good at putting the customer at the center of everything they do. Even a 5% increase in customer retention can lead to bigger profits, according to Bain & Company and Harvard Business School studies show. The customer experience leaders in Watermark’s new Customer Experience ROI study outperformed competitors and reported returns 45 points higher than the S&P 500 Index.
Employees of customer-focused companies also feel and perform better, according to the studies, than their counterparts in other organizations.
A customer -centric culture begins with employees
A customer-centered culture is a set of guiding beliefs and principles that influence how employees think and act, regardless of whether they interact with customers. All employees must understand who their customers are and what they want or struggle with, so that they can make products, services, processes, and decisions in the greatest interest of customers.
[Read also: The undeniable impact of employee experience on customer experience]
Developing or strengthening a customer-centered culture must be inherent in an organization’s culture, and it requires consistent effort from every stakeholder.
Here are six techniques tested in battle to promote a more customer -centered culture.
Step 1: Evaluate the strength of your customer center
You can’t improve so much what you can’t measure. Customer experience analysis will demonstrate the strength of your customer center and identify top opportunities for improvement. Monitoring progress over time is necessary.
We recommend including high-impact survey questions in your current semi-annual or annual employee engagement survey, which should yield great insights from every corner of your organization. Dive into the three dimensions of customer center:
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If employees know how they contribute to the customer experience
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If people managers make decisions with the customer in mind
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Whether employees believe their company is constantly making decisions in the best interests of the customer.
You can’t improve so much what you can’t measure.
If possible, add open-ended questions that allow employees, in their own words, to suggest how to create a stronger culture of customer experience.
An off-the-shelf assessment of the maturity of the customer experience is another option. They are simple and require participation from only a handful of subject matter experts from your organization. We recommend Forrester’s Gauge Your CX Management Maturity, Gartner Research’s Customer Experience Management Maturity Model, or Qualtrics ’Customer Experience Competency and Maturity Assessment.
Step 2: Create a vision using the C-suite
Include your C-suite in your analysis results. Using insights from your customer-centricity analysis, highlight the best opportunities to strengthen your organization’s focus on the customer experience. Executive buy-in for your plan is a must for success.
Every leader needs to be prepared to shift internal focus on operations, processes, and siled operations toward a customer -first approach. Changing the company’s mindset to prioritize the customer, along with IT operations and enhancements, can improve customer and employee satisfaction and generate significant economic profits, according to McKinsey.
Step 3: Set goals and expectations
Once the executive team is aligned with a customer experience vision and plan, focus on embedding customer-focused goals at the company, team, and individual levels.
At the organizational level, partner with people who lead annual strategic planning and company -wide goal setting (typical company strategy) to ensure company goals are designed to encourage a customer -first mentality and strengthen practices. customer -focused. Build customer -centricity in your annual planning by answering two important questions: Do funding priorities align with your core customer experience needs? Do your organizational goals measure the results and success of your customers?
[Read also: Building a customer journey mapping program]
To ensure that every individual in the organization is accountable for customer -focused goals, encourage your human resources leaders to review team and individual goal setting so that everyone has a customer -focused goal in their goals. in performance and know that customer -focused habits will be rewarded.
Step 4: Develop customer understanding and empathy
To encourage the entire organization to put customers at the center of everything, expose employees to your customer’s high and low experience as well as customer needs.
Here are some of the most effective strategies:
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Regularly invite customers to team -wide and company -wide events so that employees can better understand them and learn about their successes and challenges. While it may be uncomfortable to expose your customer pain points in this type of setting, it helps keep employees focused on improving the customer experience.
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Hold learning sessions where you ask cross-organizational teams to evaluate customer feedback focused on a top customer pain point, and then brainstorm ideas to enhance the experience. Due to customer feedback, each participant will add their own expertise and barriers to the discussion.
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Provide employees with customer experience insights. Transparency is important! Share your customer experience insights with all employees — during key employee meetings or through accessible online dashboards and reports — so they can include and prioritize customer feedback when planning action. You might also consider setting up a virtual or physical “customer room,” where employees can access the latest customer journey maps, post-insight reports, and video and voice recording customers sharing their experiences.
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Facilitate more direct and personal interaction with customers by allowing employees to observe sales and support calls (aka ride-alongs). For non -customer -facing employees, it can be a great tool in building empathy.
Step 4: Create a strategic communication plan
Creating and maintaining your customer -centered culture will work best when there is an internal plan with strategic communications to keep this in mind. An effective activation plan will focus on the following elements:
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Work with your executive team to build and cascade your intended customer experience. A shared perspective — one that continues to be communicated — goes a long way toward establishing the customer-focused culture you’re looking for. Strengthen this customer -focused messaging by telling and retelling the story of how your employees will make your ambition in the customer experience a reality.
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Keep the company updated on progress toward your established customer-focused metrics. Update all employees at organizational and company-wide meetings on your customer experience goals and progress toward those goals. Sharing quarterly customer loyalty metrics and employee and customer centricity metrics and targets should be as important as sharing quarterly revenue.
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Celebrate customer-centered employees individually and in front of their peers through formal recognition programs to highlight the behaviors you want to use and set an example for all employees. Sharing their customer-focused stories, inside and out, will help you recruit more like-minded individuals.
Step 5: Hire for customer-focused behavior
Embedding customer center in your hiring practices is one of the most effective strategies for maintaining and accelerating a customer-obsessed culture. A customer -centered mindset may be one of the most important selection criteria for all new hires in all roles. Recruiters and hiring managers should evaluate candidates for their ability to express empathy and a customer -first mindset.
Onboarding and ongoing training should demonstrate how an employee’s work affects his or her customers and reinforces desired behaviors. A formal onboarding plan to educate new hires about your customer -centered culture is critical.
Step 6: Take care, take care, take care
It takes consistent effort and attention to maintain a customer-focused culture. It’s an evolving process as you add employees, reorganize company structures, introduce new customer experiences, and transfer employees to other roles. Even those companies with a strong customer culture — and the high NPS and employee engagement scores to prove it — need to continue to foster this ethos.
Developing these measures is hard work but worth it, as a mature customer-centric approach can lead an organization to world-class results.
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