What are the steps to create a customer-centric culture?

In my experience, tailored communication is the foundation in building the most successful customer relationships. We need to have a concrete understanding of different communication styles and become comfortable communicating in the ways that align with the customer. Using your customer’s preferred communication style will allow you to quickly gain the necessary trust that leads to uncovering wants, needs, and pain points so your solution can bring the most value.

In my experience, attitude is directly effecting success in this area. If your account can feel your attitude as a friendly and helpful, you can increase your success rate but if you cannot create a bond like that, that relationship just can be professional and thats not bad also. The trick is, a good account manager should understand which type of relationship will be good for business.

You're absolutely right! Building a customer-centric culture requires ongoing dedication and efforts to ensure it becomes ingrained in an organization's values and operations. It's not a one-and-done task; it's a continuous journey of prioritizing customer needs and feedback.

The first step, in my opinion, would be to bring a mindset change in the team to understand & appreciate what constitutes a customer-centric approach. We need to realize why its important to focus on the customer needs more than the product needs, as in the end, the products are being built to address a need of the customer. If we keep the customer at the center of everything we do, our job is half done already. The next step would be to define customer segments & understand the various user-types/personas involved in the day to day transactions. This segmentation is important as all our actions, deliverables & project outcomes should revolve around the requirements of these personas. What suffices for one may not fit the need of the other.

Two things that help drive customer centricity: - Quarterly updates to the entire business - The account management lead should present to the business, or key stakeholders, on activities relating to clients. This might include previous quarters successes, overview of financials, areas of focus for next quarter, challenges and risks, changes in client strategy, a call to action (where can people in the business support the AM team to improve customer satisfaction, drive revenue etc.), and provide shout outs to anyone in the business that has demonstrated a customer first approach. 2) Client Eye Sessions - Ask clients to present to the business and share their strategy, business model and challenges.

Aligning the team & stakeholders around customer centricity should be the 1st step in driving a customer-centric approach. The team must understand the benefits associated with putting customer first in all transactions to ensure that the solution built serves both the stated & unstated needs of the customer. It's important to be able to differentiate between the customer 'needs' & 'wants', and agree with the stakeholders on the right prioritization of the requirements.

Creating customer value with each deployment should be the objective of the team. The whole group should have an overarching view of the customer business processes and understand the impact of each requirement/user-story delivered. For instance, an initiative to reduce the lines of code & increase modularity to make the code better should be seen as an attempt to reduce the time taken to complete a business process (accomplishing payment completion or finishing a cart check-out process faster etc) thereby increasing customer satisfaction, as the completing the same transaction would now take lesser time as compared to earlier. This value created could go on to benefit other downstream business processes as well.

It is also important to build relationships with internal stakeholders as you'll need their buy-in to deliver a best-in-class experience for your clients. Not every function is going to have priorities and goals that align with those of your clients. So, it is important that you create opportunities for other functions to meet and engage their counterparts on the client side. This will help increase overall engagement but importantly, increase internal awareness of what clients are trying to achieve and why. As an AM, you have to guide those relationships so that they stay positive and increase overall customer centricity.

According to my experiences, this is the most important skill for this role. Unsolvable problems can solvable with strong relationship and loyalty. This is not a skill you can learn from a book or someone can teach you. This is human nature. Thats because it is a unique term.

Innovation is the need of the hour. But when we cant innovate, we need to adapt. With the break-neck speed of technological enhancements and the growing competition in every market with so many players competing for the same piece of the pie, its important that organizations pre-empt the needs of the customers and plan for upcoming changes even before the customers knows it themselves. This value creation, both in terms of business uptime/revenue increase & increased customer equity/faith in the team, would go a long way in ensuring a better customer journey in the future. If innovation is not possible due to tech/other constraints, then we need to adapt to ensure that the customer is not left behind in comparison to their competitors.

As a leader, you are expected to show the way forward by embedding customer centricity in all aspects of your actions. Unless the team sees their leader following it in letter-&-spirit, achieving customer centricity in its truest sense and realizing its full potential would be very difficult.

Cultural transformation starts at the top. Senior leaders need to live and breathe customer centricity and lead by example. To reinforce these behaviours leaders must communicative regularly and effectively. Positive changes in behaviour must be recognised throughout the entire organisation and rewarded. Regular training needs to be given to the whole organization (not just sales) and the recruitment process must focus on attracting the right types of people.

Understand and empathize with your client's challenges is a must. Patience is crucial in building strong, long-term relationships and can be a savior skill. Being pushy and patient at the same time can be hard to understand and execute but if you can do it, you can be well prepared for every kind of situation.