Customer Centricity Is More Than Offering Good Customer Service
Many of the companies believe that Customer-centricity is an approach of doing businesses with a focus on providing good customer service before and after the sale, for better customer retention and advocacy. However, a customer-centric company is more than a company that offers good customer service.
So, what’s it all about?
Customer Centricity is about positioning the customer at the core of your business.
Customer-Centricity is about understanding the true needs of the customers, Companies might really care about their customers but they often end up misinterpreting that being customer focussed is the same as being customer-centric and use the two terms exchangeable. Customer-focused companies focus on customer wants and try to identify products or services that would best match the wants of their customers. On the other hand, Customer-centric companies using a customer-centric approach understand what the customer truly needs, create a product/solution to the customer’s needs to deliver the most value.
Customer centricity comes by making decisions with the customer in mind, Customer-centric companies put the customer at the forefront of every single decision they make, from the products they develop to the marketing campaigns they create and everything in between. And it’s an important part to align the organization around customers and make every touchpoint with a customer reflect companies’ brand. Whether big or small, every decision they make is based on continuous customer feedback.
Customer centricity is about building a culture, where the customer experience isn’t an afterthought or an accidental result of the customer service they receive. It is a culture where every individual in every role operates under the assumption that they have the potential to impact the overall experience of the customer with each decision that they make. Improving the customer service department alone will not create a customer-centric culture across the organization. Every employee in the organization must understand who are their customers, what are their needs and pains — not just customer service representatives. The entire organization needs to be aligned around the customer which includes the key decision-makers, technology teams like engineering & product development teams, marketing, sales, and service, etc.
Customer-Centric companies need to understand their customers to a granular level, Identifying the demographics of their customers is a good start, but it doesn’t make the organization customer-centric, companies need to know more about the lifestyles, behaviors of customers to understand them to a granular level, This starts with interacting with customers. If products are built without testing the concepts with real-life customers, the product might fail once products are introduced into the market, It might be because the price point might be wrong or features may not be what customers need or the product may not solving the customer’s pain or problems. Marketing campaigns designed based on an in-depth understanding of customers are likely to yield better results and resonate well with customers than marketing campaigns created based on gut feelings.
Customer-Centric companies need to identify high valued customer segments i.e. customers with high lifetime value(LTV), Organizations to be customer-centric need to understand that not all of their customers yield profits. Organizations need to perform a detailed analysis of their customer by gathering the data from multiple sources and channels to gain a complete view of their customer profiles and segment them into low LTV or high LTV. It is easy for companies to retain customers with the highest customer lifetime value as they are the ones who are loyal to the company. Thus, companies need to acquire and then retain these customers by nurturing relationships with them and enhance their customer experience.
To Wrap it up,
Offering the best customer service or being customer focussed could be a key element of being customer-centric, however true customer-centricity involves far more than that. If any organizations aim to be Customer-centric, they need to identify high valued customer segments and need to place their customers at the forefront of every decision they make, action they take, or products & services they build around the needs of their highly valued customers by creating a company-wide customer-centric culture where everyone in the organization understands why the focus on the customer is a priority and how important it is to the organization’s long-term success.
