There is a major skill most organizations lack: Customer centricity. But if you want to remain competitive in today’s economic climate, putting the focus on Customers is imperative to your bottom line. It was 20 years ago when the realization that I wasn’t Customer centric hit me. Because of the three following reasons: I operated from a mindset of what was good for the company and ignored the impact on Customers. Operate with Customer in mind. MORE

Having a Customer-Centric culture doesn’t happen by accident. It takes a lot of work and concentration to create a deliberate Customer experience from all the parts of your organization. The reason you are delivering the Customer experience you do today is because of the way the organization is. We use a Customer Experience Assessment model called Naive to Natural to assess our client’s Customer centricity, defining the level of Customer focus you have currently. MORE

Customer Centric Culture Lynn Hunsaker. What Does it Mean to be Customer-centric? To have the customer’s best interests as the focus of your attention — not to be pre-occupied in your own interests at the customer’s expense. To do this, you need to: (1) Really know the customer in order to anticipate their best interests. (2) Customer-Centric Primary Motives: Making it easier and nicer for the customer to get and use solutions. MORE

All is well and good except when it comes to product-centric organizations believing and acting as if whatever they manufacture and sell or offer as a service is perfectly aligned with client needs and wants. Think of service as an intangible product that, through an exchange, delivers a tangible benefit to the customer. I was selling complex and highly customized laboratory robotic and automation systems into the biotech and pharmaceutical industry. MORE

Listen to any company in almost every industry, and you’ll undoubtedly hear phrases like customer-centric and customer-focused touted as top priorities. When leaders of a company fail to explain or provide specific examples of what it really means to be customer-centric, employees often see these words as little more than corporate platitudes. Companies feel obligated to go on record as being customer-centric. Becoming Customer-Centric. MORE

Customer Centric Mission & Values Lynn Hunsaker. Customer-centricity is about priorities. Johnson & Johnson has an excellent way of communicating their customer-centric priorities: 1) doctors, nurses, patients, parents; 2) employees; 3) communities; 4) stockholders. Customers’ orders must be serviced promptly and accurately. Customer-focused priorities organically produce desired results for employees, communities and stockholders. MORE

As a corporate culture consultant and as a speaker, I hear clients frequently voicing this concern. A strong, consciously developed pro-customer (and pro-employee) company culture is a business advantage that will serve you for years—and inoculate your brand against competitive inroads. How to make a customer-centered culture happen. Your core values should cover how customers, employees, and vendors should be treated at all times. MORE

Most companies today know that putting the customer at the heart of everything they do is vital. The fact is, improving your Customer Experience means you must also become more customer-centric. But what is customer-centricity and how do you do it? Creating and sustaining a customer-centric culture was the subject of a recent podcast. When I worked at British Telecom almost 20 years ago, Customer Experience was just becoming a thing. MORE

Customer Centric Internal Branding Lynn Hunsaker. Customer centric internal branding revolves around customer well-being. Internal branding has various meanings, such as becoming employer of choice, communicating the company’s marketing programs to employees, emphasizing core values, engaging employees for high morale and productivity, or aligning internal behaviors with what’s promised to customers. (By MORE

One interesting bit of his speech touched on an important issue for Customer Centricity: data breaches. He said the federal standard he would impose to notify Customers their information had been compromised should be 30 days. I am surprised that it would take as long as 30 days to tell a Customer of a data breach! If they have the need to legislate, then lags in notifying Customers must have happened so many times they feel the need to put it in law! MORE

Customer Centric Employee Engagement Lynn Hunsaker. Organizations that are centered around their customers know that it’s not a part-time role. To truly be customer-centric , everyone company-wide needs to have a deep understanding of the customer’s world. And beyond this sharp awareness, everyone needs to be constant in their personal alignment with the customer’s world, exemplified by their decision-making and behaviors. MORE

Customer-Centric Hiring Builds Trust Lynn Hunsaker. When customer experience requirements guide the hiring process, a company is practicing outside-in thinking. In fact, most companies that are consistently listed as top customer service providers have very deliberate methods for choosing the right people who will properly represent the company’s brand promise. We take our customers and our competition seriously — not ourselves.” MORE

Customer Centric Service Design Lynn Hunsaker. Imagine the power of pictorially summarizing your customer survey results so that stakeholders can understand possible customer experience improvements within 10 minutes! Reality Maps help your project teams learn about end-to-end customer experience and pain points in a storyboard format, with an eye toward future innovation. “By 3) How will the solution work for the customer? MORE

For Command Alkon, gathering customer feedback on the direction of the company and its efforts for delivering an A+ customer experience is a top priority. To keep the focus on customers, the company partnered with Satrix Solutions to manage its Voice of the Customer ( VoC) program. Here’s our interview with Leo Marthe, Director of Customer Success, on how the company has been able to achieve VoC success. Our goal is deliver an A+ Customer Experience. MORE

The way customers interact with brands has drastically changed over the past few years. In the words of Forbes contributor Brian Walker, " Digitally empowered customers are firmly in charge, bouncing from channel to channel at the drop of a hat.” It is now more important than ever before to intertwine marketing efforts with sophisticated customer relationship management tools to deliver a seamless customer experience at every touch point in the purchasing cycle. MORE

Knowing what you’re customers are saying about your is just the tip of the ice berg! Last week, WCL CM teamed up with Hello Customer and Paul Laughlin, to get to grips on how companies can be more customer centric. Bram de Vos of Hello Customer , told us how keeping in touch with customers during the post-purchase phase provides vital information on how you’re performing. Customer Centricity Digital Latest Thinking MORE

There's a famous statistic that 80 percent of executives believed their organization delivered a superior customer experience, but only 8 percent of customers agreed. A 2017 study by Capgemini Consulting sought to provide updated insight into the so-called executive disconnect. Executives still believe they are doing well, with 75 percent saying their organization is customer-centric. Just 30 percent of customers agree. What are your customers doing? MORE

The customer-centric mindset entails making major decisions while taking customer needs and customer journeys into account. This responsibility is not limited to the CSM (Customer Success Manager) alone, a company-wide disposition to customer satisfaction is crucial to customer success. This is as a result of greater customer trust which reduces churn, increases renewals, and bolsters user adoption through referrals and testimonials. MORE

The same can be said of customer centricity. Customer centricity doesn’t happen overnight. If you want to build a customer-centric culture at your company, then you’d better be able to live with process and incremental improvement. If we boil it down to its essence, there’s a five-step process to customer centricity. Customer-centric culture is a matter of commitment at all levels of your business. MORE

Customer-Centric Innovation Lynn Hunsaker. What defines a customer-centric organization, and why is taking a customer-centric approach increasingly seen as important? Clear Action’s Lynn Hunsaker and Patricia Seybold Group’s Matthew Lees argue the business case for a customer-centric organization. When the customer’s well-being comes first in your decision-making, you’re customer-centric. the customer’s world. MORE

Do you allow Customers to use whatever channel they wish to communicate with you, or do you restrict them to one or two channels? The answer to this question can show how Customer centric your company is. This post is the fifth in a series of nine posts that uses our Naïve to Natural customer-centricity assessment. Today we are looking at Channels, one of the nine parts of your current experience that contributes to Customer centricity of your organization. MORE

Did you miss this Customer Experience Update Webinar from the end of November? Read the transcript below: Nicholas Rodriguez: …the highest priorities for Contact Centers that focus on the customer. So, Talkdesk Enterprise Contact Center empowers companies to make their Customer Experience a competitive advantage. Over 1,400 innovative enterprises around the world with thousands of seats including IBM, Acxiom and Zumiez rely on Talkdesk to power their customer interaction. MORE

Customer Centric Employee Engagement Lynn Hunsaker. Organizations that are centered around their customers know that it’s not a part-time role. To truly be customer-centric , everyone company-wide needs to have a deep understanding of the customer’s world. And beyond this sharp awareness, everyone needs to be constant in their personal alignment with the customer’s world, exemplified by their decision-making and behaviors. MORE

Customer Centric Sales & Service Policies Lynn Hunsaker. For example, think of Zappos and LL Bean: for their customer-centric sales and service policies, they’ve earned widespread admiration among customers, as well as among executives across a variety of industries who’ve sought to learn from them. As we strive to win customers’ hearts and share-of-wallet, remember that kindness breeds gratitude , which builds customer enthusiasm for a brand. MORE

Customer Centric SWOT: Align Strategies to Customer Priorities Lynn Hunsaker. Start with your customer in mind whenever you use a management technique. Strategies that start with the customer set the stage for daily behaviors that are customer-centric. The customer is left out of most templates you find in consultants’ toolboxes or business classes. 1) First, know your customers’ priorities and challenges and trends. MORE

Customer Centric Decisions Lynn Hunsaker. Do you have a customer-focus creed? In the conference room of a company I visited recently a poster served as a clear reminder for customer centric decision-making. Think about the highest priorities indicated by your most recent customer feedback, and how you could insert those priorities into a poster like this one: Our goal is to increase customer retention through product and service value creation. MORE

Reuters Events are excited to announce their next free customer service & experience webinar: ‘Kickstarting Your Customer-Centric Culture.’. It is becoming clearer that top-class customer experience cannot be achieved without nurturing great employee experience. MORE

It’s the most customer-centric thing you might read today! When an organization truly embraces the idea of customer-centricity , amazing things can happen. Considering the customer at the center of all means re-framing situations and addressing the intent of the customer – not just the outcome. They took into account how these customers are actually RAVING FANS of their product. Is customer-centric thinking in your DNA? MORE

In a recent article , Lance Zingale discusses how lasting success for companies requires emphasis on customer lifetime value. In order to boost customer lifetime value, Zingale says that companies need to do the following: 1) Focus on improving every step in the entire customer journey with touchpoint analytics. . 2) Utilize artificial intelligence (AI) to help customers with chatbots and messaging channels. . MORE

Customer Centric Listening Lynn Hunsaker. Listen to your customers’ experiences at the highest levels in your company to set customer-centricity standards. There’s no substitute for fresh unvarnished customer stories in aligning your culture to customers’ values and concerns. I recommend prioritizing the listening effort by the cumulative lifetime profit of various customer segments. MORE

Customer Centric Processes for Stellar Customer Experience Lynn Hunsaker. All processes within a company have the potential to impact customer experience. However far removed from the customer you perceive a process to be, there is a snowball effect for employees’ (and suppliers’ and partners’) behaviors that can eventually permeate end-users. Customer-facing employees are only as effective as the rest of the company enables them to be. MORE

Customer success consultants are an experienced and established party with a primary objective to serve the customer success niche. The members of the customer success consultation zero in on developing a strong foundation for the domain to dwell and accelerate. MORE

In building relationships with customers, and value for them, my long-time observation is that most organizations tend to progress through several stages of performance as they are becoming truly customer-centric: a) customer awareness, b) customer sensitivity, c) customer focus, and d) customer obsession. Customer Awareness. Customer Sensitivity. Customer Focus. Michael Lowenstein, Ph.D., MORE

What is Customer Centricity DNA? What is customer-centricity DNA? And centricity means “being situated at the center; a position of central prominence or importance”. Accordingly, customer-centricity DNA means your business is customer-centered in all that it does. Your business can develop customer-centricity DNA. Weave customer-centered thinking and doing in everything everyone does. What is Customer-Centricity DNA? MORE

The Art of Listening: A Key to Customer-Centricity Lynn Hunsaker. Curiosity is the key to great listening skills that improve customer experience. When you’re truly curious about your customer’s opinions, expectations and requests, you’ll find the customer to be more pleasant, interesting and fulfilling to you as well. Consider internal customers as well as external customers in honing this skill. Practice Customer-Focused Listening Skills. MORE

After all, the hospitality industry should be highly customer centric, as it relies on satisfying its guests. They both (should) have their customers at their heart. Having additional control of our lives today, means that customers are re-evaluating what they are offered. MORE

Customer Centric Action Plans Lynn Hunsaker. Monitoring voice of the customer is one thing, but can all your employees name the customers’ top ten wish list? Barclays’ personal performance reviews include a strategic satisfaction index, which includes a retrospective 3-month comparison to other banks and continuous improvement of the customers’ top ten wish list. MORE

This week we feature an article by Dawn Gucciardo who took my model of Six D’s to Creating a Customer-Centric Culture and applied it to developing and implementing a CRM software. – Shep Hyken. Shep Hyken believes customer centricity must start on the inside, with your employees. As a reference, Shep defines the Six D’s of Creating a Customer-Centric Culture in his Customer Service Blog: Define it. Happy Customers. MORE

I have spent the last five years working with companies – not as an employee, but as a consultant. People who seem to completely ‘get it’ — the need to become ever more customer centric to enable sustainable business growth. What the customer strategy is – or if there even is one. How the business is performing – financially and from the customer perspective. Connecting people is, in my opinion, the key to customer centric leadership. MORE