A customer-centric culture is where the customer is at the core of every decision. Every process starts and ends with customer satisfaction in mind. In a customer-oriented market economy, customers are treated as gods. If a good number of customers are not happy with your company products, you have no business in this highly competitive market place. In fact, these days customers are running the show, paying the salaries of your employees and ensuring profits. In return, they expect goods and services that make their lives easier. A customer-centric culture is an ideology which ultimately results in increased customer retention and monetary gains.
According to Salt Lake City Motivational Speaker, culture starts at the top and gradually percolates down to the bottom of the ladder. To excel in breeding a healthy organizational culture, you need the support of middle and lower management. If you want to embrace a customer-centric culture, spend some quality time with your team to help them improving the customer experience. Here are 6 effective ways to create a customer-centric culture in your organization.
1. Customer satisfaction should be a part of your values
Customer centricity should be the focal point of your company’s philosophy with core values emphasizing how customers, vendors, and employees would be treated. It will have a deep impact on your company’s attitude towards customer issues, business strategy, and your employees’ perception of customer satisfaction. Your philosophy of customers first, should be articulated in a clear and concise manner.
2. Create Awareness for customer-centric culture
The probability of selling to an existing customer is 60-70% as compared to just 5-20% for new prospects.
Companies with a customer-centric culture have a higher valuation as compared to their competitors. You need to create awareness that customer satisfaction is the core of your business values. Spread customer-centric values throughout the organization using banners, posters, pictures, and other signs. It should be obvious to your target customers that customer satisfaction is on top of your priority list.
3. Make customer satisfaction your top priority
Give top priority to customer satisfaction even if you have to revise schedules, sacrifice holidays, cancel important meetings, and compromise profits. Every person in your organization should realize the importance of customers and the employees must be appreciated for compromising other tasks for achieving great customer satisfaction. You need to give them ownership of their clients and encourage them to take decisions when required.
4. Reward employees for customer satisfaction
To ensure a customer-centric culture, reward employees who go the extra mile to resolve customer issues or improve customer satisfaction. Employee’s attitude towards customers improves when they know that they have personal stakes in customer satisfaction. Gradually, a customer-centric culture takes shape when everyone strives to please the customer. There, a customer-centric culture takes shape where everyone is striving to please the customer and where sales numbers and achievement of targets are not the only criteria to determine top performers.
5. Enlist support of everyone
A customer-centric culture can be evolved only when all the departments like sales and services departments, product development, engineering teams and the company’s key decision makers are involved. Ask your engineering teams to spend some time in customer support and get customer feedback. Identify dissatisfied customers and arrange a conference call with all the key decision makers of the company.
6. Make customer satisfaction an ingredient of recruitment policy
Professionals joining your company should understand the importance you accord to customer satisfaction. They should understand that every employee of the company has a stake in customer satisfaction and be ready to go the extra mile for it. In a nutshell, you need to create an environment where every employee takes customer satisfaction into consideration before making any decisions.
