What does customer centric really mean?

Customer centric & customer centricity terms are frequently used by leaders and managers across different organizations, an admirable quest to fulfill but what does it really mean? Do all organizations really achieve it? All of us acknowledge that physical products evolve, that is; from old cassettes to CDs to IPods for example, does customer service evolve as well?

A classification of your current customer service level would be due at this stage, and I am a fan of Kaufman’s (2020) six levels of customer service; it is basic & direct.

Criminal service: Criminal service is bad. It is a service that violates even minimum expectations, the kind of service that your customers remember never to use again and are angry enough to call you and complain about.

Basic Service: Basic service is disappointing. It is the point of frustration that can turn into anger—but when it is over the customer is not disappointed enough to complain. However, he will tell his friends, and will remember not to call you for that kind of service again.

Expected Service: Expected service is nothing special. It is the average, the usual, the norm. The customer might come back to you, but only if no better options exist.

Desired Service: Desired service is what your customers hope for and prefer. They will do business with your organization again because you do things for them just the way they like it.

Surprising Service: Surprising service is something special, like an unexpected gift. It gives your customers more than they expected. This makes you an organization that customers enjoy and will come back to again and again.

Unbelievable Service: Unbelievable service is astonishingly fantastic. This is the level of service your customers cannot forget the legendary treatment they will tell all their friends about.

Keep in mind that there are competitors out there who are striving & evolving as well, so, what is perceived as an unbelievable service will soon scale down to become surprising, then desired then it eventually becomes expected. Moreover, your customers expectations also grow (Kano's model) therefore, what is precieved as exceptional today all your customers will assume is a given moving forward. Looking at products -for example- cars with windows electric controls used to be promoted as an option back in the 90s, nowadays, you would assume any car comes with windows electric controls, otherwise, you would simply be dissatisfied.

How do you instill customer service in the organization’s DNA? and how do you ensure your customer service employees are truly customer focused?

Kamath’s (2018) presentation of “Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs Says about Customer Service” is a simple way of presenting the path for it,

Looking at the right data: CRM platforms will help pull out reports, every single call and email interaction matters, not just for customers but for your teams as well. These reports can identify patterns and create appropriate training opportunities to teach customer-facing teams on how to handle interactions.

Personalization: The next step to improving the level of customer service your business is training the team on how to adapt to the system for taking the right decisions. When an agent is on call with a client, he should have relevant information on his dashboard so he can personalize the conversation. Personalizing a call with pleasantries is good; understanding the problem, reviewing past orders and interactions can give agents insight on how to best communicate with every customer.

KPIs to measure effectiveness: To measure customer service, some KPIs need to be introduced to ensure that your strategy is working, some of those KPIs are: Overall satisfaction, customer retention, Net Promoter score, conversion rate, average resolution time, active issues, resolved issues, complaint escalation rate just to name a few

Contact-center customization: To build a functional and scalable help-desk team, organizations need to focus their attention to smaller details. Even miniscule details can work as a hurdle to the customer experience and create problems for the customers.

While customer service is a discipline on its own, I thought of touching base on the basics of it and there is much more to cover however, this will break my 2 min read time target.