Customer Centricity can become your strongest moat

It’s an exciting time to be a customer. You are spoilt for choice and need not be loyal to any one brand when you have so many brands wooing for your attention. You can pick your purpose and find brands that are living it through their products. 

For a brand though, while getting a business up and running is easier than ever before, attracting and retaining customers has become an uphill task. Your product is no longer easily distinguishable from other similar products, your customer is no longer restricted by artificial barriers like location and has become more discerning and fickle than ever. 

In a time like this, customer centricity can become the moat that sets you apart from your competitors. Putting the customer first consistently, whether it is while designing your product/service or in your marketing messaging will give you an easy magnate for your target audience. 

Being customer-centric means thinking about the person who is going to buy from you while taking any strategic decision. It means reaching out to your customers, understanding what matters to them, and consistently reiterating that in everything you do. 

Here’s why customers reward user-first brands – 

• They feel safe doing business with these brands
• The delight of their experience gives them a reason to keep buying from these brands  
• They trust the brand to have their best interest in mind

 Laying the Ground for Customer Centricity

Customer Centricity is not the job of one team or one person. It is every employee’s responsibility. The biggest step towards making a customer-centric brand is to sell the idea to each and every employee first. From hiring to establishing KPIs, customer centricity must start at the grassroots and ooze out every detail within the organization. While a customer-centric culture definitely starts at the top and trickles down from there, its key drivers are marketing and sales leaders. These are the people getting direct feedback from the market on what their customers want. 

In Marketing, reaching out to customers on a regular basis, testing, and tweaking messaging are all steps towards being more aware of what impacts and moves your customer. Customer-centric marketing ensures that the customers get all the information and knowledge they need to make a buying decision. Customer-centric marketing is data-centric marketing. Data is used for understanding the customer and in turn delivering value through relevant, personalized messaging. It is Marketing’s job to ensure that customers are given opportunities to express their thoughts and have the agency to define the nature of their relationship with the brand.

Customer-centric organizations rely heavily on Customer support team members to understand how their product or service is being accepted, what are the roadblocks, and what the customers expect from their association with the brand. 

Sales teams are privy to the harshest, most honest opinions of their product or service and can collaborate with internal teams to ensure customer satisfaction. They are also uniquely placed for forging long-term, meaningful relationships with customers. 

 5 Essential Customer Values to Embed in Your Team

Creating a customer-centric culture begins with defining what customer-centricity means for the organization, communicating its importance, empowering employees, collecting and using customer feedback, fostering collaboration, and continuously measuring and improving. When all these elements come together, a customer-centric culture can become ingrained in the organization’s DNA, leading to long-term success and customer loyalty.

The five essential customer values that every organization must have are;

1. Learning Through Feedback – Any growth-centric organization would be obsessed with continuous improvements. Nothing is set in stone. Agility and adaptation are prioritized in customer-centric teams. Customer feedback regularly finds its way into processes in such organizations. An ecosystem that revolves around collecting and analyzing feedback, collaborating to act on feedback, and following up with customers helps instill customer loyalty, advocacy and a deliver customer experience
2. Approachability – By improving communication both internally and externally, simplifying processes, providing accessible support, and encouraging feedback, you can become more approachable to your customers. This can lead to increased customer satisfaction, loyalty, and advocacy, and ultimately drive long-term business success.
3. Integrity – Instilling integrity as a culture in an organization requires a holistic approach that involves creating policies, establishing expectations, leading by example, and promoting accountability. By developing a code of conduct, establishing expectations, leading by example, promoting accountability, and providing ongoing training, you can help instill integrity in teams. This can help build trust with stakeholders, enhance the reputation of the organization, and drive long-term success.
4. Transparency – By communicating openly, sharing customer feedback, providing access to information, being honest about mistakes, and encouraging feedback, you can use transparency to become more customer-centric. This can lead to increased customer satisfaction, loyalty, and advocacy, and ultimately drive long-term business success.
5. Relationship Building – By understanding customers, developing customer personas, tailoring communication to your ideal customer profile, building trust by delivering on promises, providing exceptional customer service, and fostering customer loyalty by going above and beyond for your customers, you can instill relationship-building as a way toward being more customer-centric. This can help create long-term customer relationships that drive business success.

The commitment of the leadership team is critical for creating a customer-centric culture. Leaders should communicate the importance of customer centricity and lead by example, demonstrating a strong commitment to putting the customer at the center of all decisions and actions. This involves setting specific customer-centric goals and metrics, such as customer satisfaction, retention, and advocacy. Empowering employees to make decisions that benefit the customer is essential for creating a customer-centric culture. Reinforcing customer centricity would involve rewarding and recognizing actions that lead to better relations with the customer.

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