Building a customer centric culture is hard, but it comes with rewards

The real test of a customer-centric culture is when things go wrong or when the economy is challenging. When everything is good, there is development and emphasis placed on the vision, purpose, and experience. However, when things go wrong or business is tight, do you continue to abide by your vision? Do you abide by your customer experience?

On June 8th in Dubai, CX leaders discussed the importance and impact of CX as it relates to developing an engaged culture and how artificial intelligence will support the way the experience is delivered.

What are the secrets to creating a culture where the customer is at the centre?

When done well, a customer-centred culture impacts all areas of the organisation – from setting the context, measuring impact, redesigning channels and touchpoints, and sharing with colleagues. It empowers, motivates, and gives customers and colleagues a powerful reason to stay with you and do more for you.

When done badly, it impacts all areas of the organisation too. However, instead of engagement, it’s transactional. Without empowerment, it moves the focus to process and resolution, rather than delivering differentiated experiences.

Key steps to transition

Four key components were identified for a successful transition from transaction to emotional experiences, internally and externally:

1. Have a clearly defined purpose (vision or customer principles)

It’s not enough to have values and behaviours defined, which most organisations have today. Colleagues need a reason for ‘why’ they come to work every day. Something to hold onto during the good times and the challenging ones.

2. Engage and bring the experience to life

What doesn’t work is having the experience, purpose, or vision, just sitting on the wall - nobody feels connected to it. But, taking it off the wall and actually embedding it at an emotional level, works.

• Build the experience into every process so colleagues understand what this looks like in their day-to-day roles
• Update your reward and recognition schemes. This should include the experience and the internal measurement of it
• Keep engagement going through informed and reinforced training
• Change everyday behaviours – e.g start all meetings off with a customer story that demonstrates the experience in action

3. Have an engaged and social community

This drives some of the transformation work for you. A well-managed internal and/or external community supports growth and reinforces your purpose through referrals, sharing experiences, and learning from each other.

4. Measuring and monitoring progress

Challenge how you collect feedback and measure – is your purpose at the heart of what you are measuring? Change your metrics so you are measuring the right things. You are looking for evidence of a change in behaviour - it's vital that sentiment is analysed across all channels.

To have a culture of continuous improvement, it’s important to understand your customers. Using tools such as journeys and personas is key for everyone internally to identify the type of customer they are dealing with. In stressful environments, like moving, travelling, or hospitals, people will react differently. Having common references and tools means that each touchpoint has a way of delivering a defined experience.

Colleagues can become overwhelmed with too many KPIs to achieve.

Being monitored by quality and process can result in the loss of realisation of what the customer really wants.

Where do tools such as artificial intelligence fit with creating and maintaining a customer-centric culture?

Everyone's talking AI and it was agreed that the companies that will make it are the ones that will pay special attention to customer experience. At the back end, Chat GPT will be focused on building add-on apps and offering additional services. But what will really make a difference is the experience. It will be the only true way to differentiate.

AI tools are being used in functional and administrative tasks like completing forms and automated tasks, however, there is still a long way to go. There still isn’t a substitute for a human.

Machine learning can be trained on how to deliver emotional intelligence – and for that reason alone, we need to stay a few steps ahead as CX practitioners. When AI gets to the point of matching human emotions, it will be a cheaper option than training people.

Using AI to understand better customer needs is a strong application of the technology. For example, when preparing to pitch to a customer in a different field to yours, asking Chat GPT for different approaches to use, is a good start. This saves time and can help identify the needs and drivers of the customer to aid the focus of your pitch.

In other applications, using AI along a customer’s journey with tools such as a chatbot works well to make the customer feel like they are talking to a person.

There is concern about correct information and delivering the emotional side of the experience; empathy, for now, can only be delivered by a person. Over time, a tone attuned to empathy and emotion will become a learned intelligence. It is agreed that privacy remains one of the main challenges to Chat GPT.

Measuring impact

Ways of measuring engagement and experiences have altered.

Previously, the focus was on customer satisfaction and activities supporting the increase of this. Now, there is a shift to customer effort – ‘How easy or simple was it doing business with us?’

Through digital experiences, constant testing through experimenting – learning, improving and measuring is good practice. All channels should be analysed for sentiment (measuring emotion) and not just transactional (measuring activity). This ensures there is collective and proactive feedback on which areas to improve and drive sales. Using this to predict what issues will come up will give you a good start on resolving any issues before they become one for the customer.

This change in direction doesn’t mean other metrics are not used, it is just the prioritisation that has changed on how the insights are used to drive change internally. The need to simplify this metric is important so everyone in the organisation knows what to focus on, which in turn supports the embedding of the experience.

Conclusion

A customer-centric culture is hard to maintain unless it is truly embedded into the DNA of the organisation. It requires persistence and commitment, however, the rewards are there. These show up as happy, engaged colleagues going above and beyond in their roles. This reflects in the customers’ needs being met, thus buying more, and recommending to others.

Last year we were talking about implementing AI. This year everyone is talking about the impact after implementing AI. This evolution is here to stay and, as CX practitioners, it’s our job to stay ahead of the game and leverage the tools available, whether it's for process improvement or measuring sentiment. Just remember to use logic when working with AI tools.

Evolution will happen.