Strategies For Customer-Centricity: Visualizing A Customer's Experience vs. Consulting The Customer

by Micah Solomon (that’s me). Originally published in Forbes.com. The author is a consultant, influencer, keynote speaker, and trainer in customer service, customer experience, customer service culture, and hospitality. (Here are three ways to reach Micah:email, chat, web).

?Customer-centricity is the discipline of attempting to see things from the customer’s viewpoint rather than from your own, including the essential understanding that those who are “in the business” simply know too much, from too internal viewpoint, to be truly customer-centric without making a conscious and disciplined effort.

As a customer-centricity consultant, specializing in using this discipline to transform companies’ customer experience, I strive to keep the concept simple, since it truly is simple, at its core: The goal is to keep the customer’s viewpoint and the customer’s ultimate wellbeing at the center of everything a company does. (I doubt I even need to draw you a diagram, but if I did, it would be a circle with the customer in the—you guessed it—center. All of our actions, at all points around the circumference, would be undertaken in response to our focus on that center point.)

Back in the heyday of Madison Avenue, brands could count on brilliant marketing—the work of real-life counterparts to Mad Men’s Don Draper and Peggy Olson–to entice a customer to buy, and keep buying, almost anything, and company reputations were made and unmade, it often seemed, more in the creative suite than based on the real-life experiences of customers.

This contrasts with the realities of the current marketplace, in which customers trust their own perceptions, the perceptions of their friends and families, and of the people they trust online, more than they trust mass marketers. And they spread their own perceptions like nobody’s business, partly because it has become so easy to share socially, and partly because it has become such an accepted practice to do so.

If we don’t know what these perceptions are, then we can neither react to them nor improve upon them, to make and keep our customers happy and singing our praises in public and in private, online and off.

How to become more customer-centric

Take the “Park where they park” approach. Once the customer-centric decision has been made, it’s important to reduce or eliminate corporate blind spots by taking what I call the “park where they park” approach. For example, stop using designated company parking; instead, scramble for parking just like your customers have to, and walk in the front door rather than an employee entrance, so you’re seeing exactly your business exactly as your customer sees it. Log in to your website the (potentially laborious) way that customers are required to, rather than using your auto-login, which preempts your learning what struggles your customers may be going through in their efforts to do business with you. And so forth.

Look for answers and clues everywhere. Being customer-centric means seeking out answers everywhere: in parsing existing data and building better surveys to get new and more-targeted data to apply to the effort; in listening for anecdotes shared by customers; in customer behavior directly observed.

Most importantly, make the decision to be purpose-driven rather than function-driven. Customer-centricity happens when leadership makes it clear, and employees get the message, that serving customers in the way they want to be served is central to the organization’s purpose. When this gets embedded in a company’s culture and mindset, we learn to sift everything through a customer-centric filter, with internal dialogue falling along these lines: “Why am I doing my job today? Because I want to please my customers. Therefore, not only am I going to do my job ‘well’–attending to all the items listed in my job description–but, where called for, I will modify my approach to the items in my daily routine, and even diverge from that list of items as needed to accomplish what my customer is asking for and what they truly need.”  

Overall, where can an organization be transformed via customer-centricity?

Customer-centricity matters in all aspects of an organization. But since “everywhere” can so often devolve into “nowhere in particular,” I suggest that an organization look at becoming more customer-centric in the following three areas:

Product: What we manufacture. A generally brilliant product design that doesn’t incorporate initial customer input or respond to customer feedback over time is destined for the junkyard, or at best to be found in a museum as an oddity, rather than opening customers’ hearts–and wallets–and finding that proud place in the customer’s garage or driveway.

Process: How we manufacture, how we sell. Over time, processes can devolve in directions that no longer suit your customers–assuming they were even designed with the customer in mind in the first place.

Business Model: How our company is conceptualized.In most organizations, there are aspects of the business model conflicts with customer-centricity. A simple example is an incorrectly incentivized sales model, where rewards conflict with doing the right thing for the customer.

 Specific Improvement Opportunities

 A customer-centric organization is interested in all customer input and feedback, but “all” risks being misconstrued as “nothing in particular.” So, consider the following four areas in particular as candidates for your focus.

Pain points: the aspects of our product, processes, and business model that stand in the way of customers enjoying what we offer.

Wow factors: Sometimes getting everything pretty much right isn’t as important as getting one particular thing really, really right. If we are doing this, we want to keep doing this. So, it’s important to keep our ears open for what these true “wow” factors are, so they don’t get overlooked in the next product cycle or the next time we revamp our processes.

Texture: Texture is the small stuff that is easy to overlook: how customers react to finishes, lighting, scents, fontography… everything that is, or isn’t, giving customers the feeling that this is “their” brand.

What’s missing: We need to know if our customers are failing to find everything they need in our available selections, and we need to know if customers are being forced to jury-rig our products or processes to be used in ways that we did not intend (which, when noticed, could lead to us designing exactly the right product or process).

Should you be consulting your customers directly about what they want?  Absolutely–but always keep in mind the risk of being misled: Lurking always is the danger that customers don’t know what they want, and will misguide you by making incorrect predictions about what they’ll want from you in the future, as in that apocryphal but useful “quote” from Henry Ford, that if he’d surveyed his customers when starting out, they would only have asked him for faster horses, rather than pressing him to develop a car. And even when innovations are introduced, the initial response isn’t necessarily indicative of ultimate acceptance. For example, some years ago, when the new iteration of Apple mobile devices required smaller, “lightning” connectors, few customers embraced the change, but instead vented their frustration with having to switch out their existing stock of larger cables to match the design of the new devices. If Apple had relented in the face of that initially-poor reception, it wouldn’t have ultimately pleased its customers as much as it was able to via the additional space the new design afforded it internally for memory and functionality.

But in a sense, these downsides of customer-centricity are actually misapplications of the concept. Because the customer-centricity discipline is partly about applying your own expertise in order to give customers what they need, whether or not they understand enough to ask for it. While I have so far stressed the importance of seeing things like a customer, sometimes customers don’t have enough knowledge, tradeskill, or clarity of vision to know what they actually need. This is where you, as an expert, can cut to the heart of the matter, answering even the unexpressed needs and wishes of customers. This is where the highest level of customer-centricity lives. And it can be transformational not only for customers but for any organization that serves them.

(AUTHOR'S NOTE: If you’d like a formatted version of the principles in this article, let me know. I’ll send you a printable version of my customer-centricity transformation principles, for your office use.)

Micah Solomon is an author, consultant, influencer, thought leader, keynote speaker, trainer, and subject matter expert (SME) in customer service, customer experience, customer service culture, hospitality, innovation. (email, chat, web).