In today’s hyper-competitive market, Customer Experience (CX) has become a key differentiator that differs brands from each other. You need to delight your customers with an exceptional customer experience.

If you invest in customer experience, it will return to your brand repeatedly.

1. 66% of consumers consider customer service while choosing any brand.
2. The brands experience 5.7 times more revenue than competitors that invest in customer experience.
3. 80% of customers prefer brands that offer personalized experiences.  
4. Customers are willing to pay a 16% price premium for better CX.
5. Customer-centric companies earn 60% more profit than companies that neglect the CX.

The growing popularity of customer experience has brought customer-centricity into the limelight. In today’s article, we’ll cover different things:

1. What is Customer-Centricity Culture?
2. Why Customer Centricity Is Important
3. How Can You Build a Customer-Centric Culture?

What is Centricity Culture?

Customer-Centricity culture is the workflow or approach you follow at different customer journey stages to foster an exceptional and positive customer experience. Customer-centricity leads to customer satisfaction & loyalty and subsequently increased referrals for more customers. To have a clear understanding of customer-centricity, let’s explore the fundamentals of customer-centricity.

Fundamentals of customer-centricity:

1. Focus on the customers’ needs and issues
2. Focus on the customer relationship success
3. Focus on collecting real-time customer feedback
4. Focus on clarifying or defining KPIs for measuring customer engagement
5. Focus on ensuring better customer services
6. Focus on providing customer satisfaction

Over the years, prestigious organizations like Amazon have deployed a customer-centricity to have a customer-centric company culture.

Why is customer-centricity important?

Adopting a customer-centricity approach builds customer trust and loyalty and enhances brand reputation. Moreover, it provides you with a transparent platform where customers and businesses can interact and resolve all issues. Subsequently, it improves the probability of positive word of mouth and boosts business growth.

There are other noticeable benefits of including a customer-centricity approach in your marketing strategies.

1.     Gives you the ability to understand the customer’s journey

To achieve overall business growth, you need to understand the customers’ relationship with your business, products, or services. There are three touchpoints in the customer’s journey – Before, During, and Post where you need to check the move in and out of the relationship.

A customer-centric approach helps you stay in touch with your customers at every stage of the customer journey and cater to them with surefire solutions to solve their issues.

2.     Gives you the ability to focus on new customers and reduce serving cost

Brands that ensure a successful set-up where customers can learn about products and services. Moreover, a customer-centric system allows customers to understand a new purchase or contract based on which customers make buying decisions. This approach will reduce the cost to serve and increase satisfaction.

3.     Gives you the ability to streamline operational efficiency

Brands that work with customers and value their feedback will ensure value-oriented products and services. In addition, it improves operational efficiency and reduces operational costs.

How to build customer-centricity in your company?

Customer-centricity does not come itself; you need to begin with your company’s culture. To make your business customer-centric, you need to widen your reach in terms of customer communication and ensure your full commitment to customers’ success. Here are some best ways to build and maintain customer-centricity in your company.

1.     Predict customers’ needs

Listening to your customers help you to create products or services that suit your customers’ needs. Considering customer needs allow you to create products that anticipate the market’s future needs.

The best way to anticipate customer needs is by listening to them. Listening to customers’ voices helps you gauge how they perceive your products and their likes and dislikes associated with your brand. Based on their suggestions, you can improve your products and services and boost the customer experience.

2.     Collect Customer Feedback by launching surveys

You can interact with or listen to your customers by collecting customer feedback through surveys. Thus, you can connect with your customers regularly or annually to measure customers’ experience and satisfaction.

A  smart survey tool provides you with various survey distribution channels to communicate – Email, SMS, Chat, In-app messages, Kiosk, iPad & Android survey device, Facebook, and much more. You can send survey questions or links via these channels and get customer feedback.

3.     Ask relevant survey questions

Survey tools enable you to collect both quantitative and qualitative feedback. Quantitative refers to close-ended questions like scoring, rating, or yes or no responses. At the same time, qualitative refers to open-ended questions like follow-up questions or reasons for scores or reviews.

While preparing survey questions, consider survey goals and target audience. For example, suppose you want to know about the purchase experience, you can ask Post-Purchase or Post-transaction NPS Questions. There are some important tips and tricks to ponder while preparing survey questions:

• Deploy an intelligent close-ended question (MCQs, rating)
• Keep your rating scale consistent ( if using rating questions)
• Avoid leading and loaded questions

4.     Test your survey

Although we are deploying survey tools to create and design surveys, still human eyes are subject to errors. To avoid this, check your surveys either by A/B testing or send survey invites to your colleagues and tell them to spot as many errors as they can. This cuts the scope of error and helps you gather accurate survey responses.

5.     Focus on customer services

Customers choose the brand or business based on customer service as well. Not only this, 78% of customers will do business with companies again after a mistake even if they provide excellent customer service.

Customer service or customer support service is the help or support that customers seek from your customer support team to learn about your product or service and resolve their queries.

You can also gauge how customers perceive your customer services through CES metrics. Customer Effort Score (CES) is a popular CX metric that measures customers’ efforts to solve their queries. CES asks a simple CES 2.0 question – On a scale of ‘very easy’ to ‘very difficult, how easy was it to interact with [company name]. 

Conclusion

A customer-centric approach requires everywhere, from C-level executives to frontline staff. So, companies should work with the motive to create and serve customers. Your customer-centric approach impacts the end customers, staying connected with your brand.

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Arvind Kumar

Arvind heads product marketing at Zonka Feedback, an all-in-one customer feedback, and survey management software. He is passionate about technology, software products, and marketing. He has spent nearly a decade helping businesses across the globe deliver uncanny customer & user experiences, market faster, and growth-hack effectively. He is an avid reader and a writer and shares insights based on experience that let readers connect with them fluently.

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