So You Think You’re Customer-Centric, Huh? Wipe That Smile Off...

Everyone wants to be more customer-centric, but it isn’t as easy as it might sound. It’s difficult to accomplish at all, and when things don’t go just right it can be downright stressful.

In fact, making the transition from the product-centric manner of thinking to the customer-centric way is rather like going through boot camp experience, and being forced to shed your civilian thinking (product centricity) and get with the program (customer centricity)!

Start with the fact that customer centricity isn’t so much a goal as it is a journey. It’s a direction in which to guide a company and its business strategy – a direction toward more customer-centric policies, as opposed to traditional, more product-centric policies. And it’s highly unlikely that you’ll ever wake up some morning and say “OK! Now we’re as customer-centric as we can be! We’re 100% customer-centric!”

If you want to know how customer-centric your own company is today, however, here are four tough questions to ask yourself: 

1. Do your managers insist on making direct contact with customers, regularly? 

When a company’s leadership is truly committed to being more customer-centric, they demand more personal contact or interaction with actual customers. This might mean attending focus groups and research interviews personally, or listening in to inbound customer phone calls, or occasionally manning an in-store position. Customer centricity begins with having an organization staffed with empathetic, customer-centric people. 

Having empathy for customers is the first step in acquiring genuine customer insight, because the executives at customer-centric companies are constantly asking themselves what it’s like to be the customer – How does the experience work? What does it feel like? And what would I want to see happen if I were the customer myself? 

2. Is success determined more by customer metrics or by product metrics? 

Entirely new metrics and reward structures must be introduced to ensure that an organization becomes more customer-centric, because almost all companies are organized around products, not customers. So you need metrics designed to capture and track the quality of the customer experience, but importantly, they must capture both its subjective and its objective quality.

New metrics are required because while the benefits of providing better customer service or generating higher customer satisfaction can be immense over the long term, they often don’t translate into immediate sales and profit. Think about it: you won’t see the economic benefit of a more loyal customer until later financial periods when the customer returns and buys more from you. But the cost of providing the better customer experience occurs today, in the current period. Because customer loyalty pays its biggest dividend in future financial periods, if your company’s budget allocation processes and incentive plans are based solely on financial performance, as measured by the antiquated, 19th Century accounting systems used by most businesses today, you won’t make much progress toward customer centricity.

3. Do managers cross organizational boundaries and supersede silos to generate enterprise-wide results?

Organizational silos are anathema to customer centricity, so if your company is truly committed to the idea, then your managers will spend time and effort overcoming these hindrances, doing their best to ensure that each customer has an experience that is consistent across all your different products and channels.

To deal with this issue, your company’s senior leadership team has to make it their business to sponsor regular, cross-departmental initiatives aimed at eliminating inconsistencies and sharing best practices. And frequent transfers of expertise, not just between geographies but between functional business units, will greatly aid a company’s push to be more customer-oriented.

4. Are your leaders trying to build and refine their own expertise in customer centricity?

Managers who are truly committed to becoming more customer-oriented will attend conferences and workshops, benchmark with other customer-centric firms, and share best practices with other business units or affiliated companies. Think of this as the flip side of a “content marketing” strategy – rather than sending content out to prospects and customers in order to improve your standing and reputation with them, you will be vacuuming content up from customers, colleagues, partners and competitors alike.

Because of the rapidly evolving nature of customer-centric competition, you have to get better and better at it simply to maintain your competitive position.

In evolutionary terms this is known as the “Red Queen effect,” after the Red Queen that Alice meets in Through the Looking Glass – a chess piece character who told her “Now, here, you see, it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place.”

So welcome to the Looking-Glass world of customer-centric competition:

Because every time Amazon, Apple, Netflix, or some other customer-centric company comes up with a new service or offering, your own customers’ expectations go up, and they will be demanding it of your company, as well.