How to build a customer-centric culture in 7 steps?

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.  

In this blog post, I’m going to walk through some methods to build a more customer-centric company culture. 

Unfortunately, not many companies are truly customer-centric! CMO council reported some years ago that only 14 percent of marketers say that customer-centricity is a hallmark of their companies. 

Culture change is challenging as it needs to happen everywhere across the company 

• It requires top-management commitment

• It requires changes to a large number of processes

• It requires changing who to hire and how to hire 

• It requires a long term commitment

But it’s definitely doable. And there are some proven methods that have worked elsewhere and will work also in your organization. 

Here's how to build customer-centric culture:

1. When recruiting, hire people with customer orientation. 

It’s important to hire people with customer focus not only in the directly customer-facing roles but in all roles. Every employee has a role to play in delivering a great customer experience, and hiring managers should screen candidates for acknowledging their own role in delivering value to the customer and having a genuine interest in understanding customers’ needs. 

2. Provide training

The hiring route can be too slow for cultural change. To speed things up, build and provide a training program to increase customer understanding, the importance of customer-centricity, knowledge about available information sources, etc. 

3. Make top-management commitment visible.

The most important events where the customer needs to be talked about are the various company-wide events where the top management is speaking. If the CEO is not interested in customers and does not talk about them, it’s going to be very difficult to build a customer-centric culture. 

4. Democratize customer insights.

Customer experience is everyone’s business. Therefore everyone should have access to customer insights. When employees understand what customers think, what their needs are, and what they think about your product or service they can feel empathy for the customer and adjust their own ways of working accordingly. 

5. Facilitate direct interaction with customers.

Seeing and hearing customers as real human beings helps in building customer empathy. Share customer feedback, interviews, and focus group discussions. Make the customer comments and faces visible across the company. 

6. Build customer empathy in processes. 

Overall, encouraging employees to understand customer needs and respond to them with empathy takes place in the process design phase across various functions. The customer service agents shouldn’t be guided to copy-paste standard responses but to ensure they understand what the problem is and help solve it with clear guidance. The product design should always be human-centric. The list of processes where empathy towards customers would help in building a more customer-centric approach is long. 

7. Tie bonuses to the customer outcomes.

This is a controversial point but often very effective, especially in organizations, where performance is driven by target setting and financial rewards. It sends a clear message about the priorities of the management. Tying financial bonuses to the CX metrics is often criticized for easily leading to metric gaming instead of cultural change. Therefore the method is not for every company. 

Building a customer-centric organization can face many challenges.

Some companies don’t see customer centricity having a high enough strategic priority when facing other conflicting short-term targets. Some organizations lack data and technology to operationalize more customer-centric processes.

But the most common issue across companies of various sizes is the lack of customer-centric culture. When a truly customer-centric culture is in place, operational challenges typically get solved quite easily.