How Do You Create a Customer Centric Culture in Business?

Creating a customer centric culture is a business strategy based on putting your customer’s needs first to provide a better experience and build long-term relationships with customers. It is at its core to use customer data to understand purchase behavior, interests, and engagement and identify opportunities to create products and services to cater to this customer-centric culture. 

Adopting a customer centric culture enables businesses to be profitable by over 60% more than businesses that do not opt to. This is factual because market competition is purely determined by companies prioritizing the principles of a customer centric culture with an excellent buyer’s journey to guide a potential customer. 

To accomplish a customer centric culture within your business and to enjoy the benefits of improved CRM sales and revenue, below are the priorities that companies must mind to create the best customer centric culture.  

Let us simplify creating a customer centric culture for your business.

1. Communication

The vision and values that top management communicates, both verbally and behaviorally, set the tone and direction. What top management focuses on guides the thinking and efforts of the entire organization. The key to maintaining a customer centric culture is consistency: at every opportunity, continually communicate the necessity of making it easier and friendlier for customers to get and use solutions.

Consistency occurs in formal and informal meetings, written correspondence, external messages, and in every business process and every management ritual, such as performance reviews, annual operating plans, performance dashboards, etc. Consistency in brand management builds trust and passion, which are necessary to maintain an authentic customer centric culture. 

2. Skills

Customer centric culture values and vision must be supported by proficiency in related technical and soft skills. Examine competency requirements relative to your customer-centric values and vision for everyone - not just customer-facing role. This includes channel partners, suppliers, and other external entities. Proficiency is the vital link between strategy and execution.

At Nordstrom, employees are selected based on their capabilities to anticipate and meet people's needs to create a customer centric culture. They're encouraged to try new approaches to selling and customer service. The mantra of using good judgment in all situations gives them a tremendous sense that they're always trusted to do right by the customer, enforcing a customer-centric culture.

3. Accountability

What gets rewarded gets done - whether the rewards are tangible or intrinsic. Interestingly, inherent rewards have proven to be more powerful in adjusting a group's ways of thinking and doing to create the right customer centric culture. Risk tolerance and penalties also determine the degree to which customer centric culture takes root. Above all, monitor cause-and-effect and perceptions of fairness in terms of logic and equity; these customer centric cultural elements are pivotal to success.

At Enterprise Rent-a-Car, customer sentiment is measured at the rental office level. Only employees in offices that score at or above the overall company average are eligible for promotion, raises, or bonuses to maintain their customer centric culture. At EMC, achieving the target for their leading indicator of customer sentiment, system availability, is a go/no-go determinant of the bonus for the entire company’s customer centric culture.

4. Systems

Systems thinking means acknowledging the big picture and linkages between its components. Scrutinize your business policies and procedures, and tools for their contribution or detraction from the goal of making it easier and friendlier for customers to get and use solutions. Systems include formal and informal inter-department communication, interactions, handoffs, and connections outside the enterprise.

At Dell, SVP of customer service Dick Hunter asked employees to send him notes about the inconsistent and dumb things the company was doing. Combining this input with customers' verbatim comments to their call center led to a significant transformation in the customer experience. Thus, improving their customer centric culture.

With the economic downturn in recent years, businesses have felt the need to adopt a customer centric culture to maintain their sales and revenue. This is apparent as companies that have prioritized creating a customer centric culture have excelled during these times, while companies that didn’t prioritize the customer journey have suffered. 

Treating customers with respect, offering excellent customer service, and building lasting relationships with customers are vital to creating a compelling customer centric culture. 

Social media has created a convenient bridge between the customer and the business. More new customers are discovering new brands via social media. Social media advertising and marketing campaigns have become popular ways for businesses to reach new customers with ads, recommendations, and updates on the brands’ social media platforms. 

The purchase decisions of their peers influence new users. Creating a customer centric culture via your social CRM can be an effective way for brands to learn more about their customers. Customer reviews and product recommendations have been highly influential in driving sales for brands in the post-pandemic era. 

Integrating your social media channels with a CRM can help businesses understand different customer demographics better. Customer segmentation data has allowed companies to create personalized experiences for more customer bases to drive better conversion. Adopting a customer centric culture in which more customer segments are being seen is an effective strategy that businesses can use via their social media channels. 

At the core of creating the best customer centric culture is CRM software. Investing in a CRM solution is an excellent way for businesses to develop a customer centric culture that is unique to them. Understanding different customers and their needs have helped companies expand into various market segments using the data from CRM software. Compare the best CRM software to find the right solution to create a customer centric culture for your business.