How to Build a Customer Centric Culture? Customer-centric culture starts at the top, engages everyone, and continually creates value. Remember that culture is the way a group thinks and acts. Therefore, anything you do that influences thinking or decision criteria, as well as actions or handoffs, can influence culture. For staying power, hook these influences into managers’ and employees’ existing routines. This is known as embedding customer-centricity into your culture.
1) Align from the Top:
a) Focus the company on the goals of your primary customer segments. This is called Intentional Customer Experience and your company’s North Star.
b) Synchronize vision, mission, values, objectives, structure, policies, and rituals1 with these customers’ goals.
c) Coordinate all the roles that manage any part of the customer experience and establish them as facilitators and influencers of the rest of the company.
d) Be consistent, straightforward, humble, brave, and generous with customers, employees, suppliers and partners of all kinds.
2 All Hands On-Deck:
a) Each executive who reports to the CEO plays a mission-critical role in customer-centricity DNA.
b) Their respective organizations must be attuned to the voice-of-the-customer and its implications for their discipline’s role.
c) All functional areas must incorporate these three elements into their daily work: (1) anticipate customers’ reactions to their decisions, (2) prevent recurrence of issues for the whole customer base, and (3) continually create mutual value across the end-to-end customer life cycle.
d) Cross-organizational collaboration is necessary, with rewards for making a difference for customers at-large.
e) Connect cause-and-effect metrics with high visibility and a holistic view.
3) Maximize Value Attainment:
a) Establish systematic cycles for company-wide attention on root causes of customers’ chronic issues, to prevent recurrence.
b) Empower all employees to be creative in generating new value that customers will reward.
c) Simplify employees’ work to enable their efficiency and effectiveness toward making customers successful.
d) Cultivate customer-centered capabilities for all employees and partners.
See also: Customer Experience Playbook
