As CX professionals, it's our job to understand our customers and their needs. And that means cultivating empathy - the ability to understand and share the feelings of others.

Customer centricity and customer understanding are critically important for any company’s competitiveness. If a company doesn’t understand and serve its customers better than the competition, it cannot win in the long term. The companies with customer focus, on the other hand, are positioned to adapt to changing customer needs and able to build customer loyalty that delivers sustainable financial rewards.

This blog post lists methods that can be used to build customer-centric company culture.

Startup entrepreneurs stereotypically believe that corporations are slow and bureaucratic. That life is easy there and your salary is just handed to you after you create some PowerPoint slides. When I was discussing with multiple VCs, my corporate background was considered a joke (at best) or a big liability (at worst).

Trust is a choice a leader must make to be a leader. A leader cannot expect each team member to earn trust - trust needs to be the starting point, the default setting in the relationship. There are times when trust is broken. But if trust is the starting point, that is less likely to happen than if the leader generally is suspicious and doesn’t trust the team.

Difficult conversations are an inevitable part of work as a manager. You might need to address a team member’s bad performance, tell a customer that the delivery will be delayed, or give a colleague feedback on how their project is progressing. How then to prepare for difficult discussions and how to manage them for the best possible outcome?

One of the things I have missed the most when working remotely during the covid-pandemic has been laughter at work. Sure, you’ll find reasons to laugh in Zoom-meetings as well, but the spontaneous moments of laughter between colleagues at work are fewer and farther between.

My colleagues and team members often say to me that one of my key strengths is my ability to listen to others. I used to shrug this compliment off. Doesn’t “ability to listen” sound like quite a minor strength? Couldn’t anyone just shut up and use their ears instead of talking constantly?

If you need to announce some bad news, always make the announcement during the early part of the week, never just before the holidays, and never just before the weekend.