Customer-centric is the new buzzword for businesses, a stark change from how organizations operated in the early nineties. The way the organizations treat their customers can be a significant deciding factor for brand loyalty, customer acquisition, and even a positive brand image.

According to Microsoft’s Global State of Customer Service survey, released in 2020, 90 percent of respondents stated that customer service is key in their brand decision and loyalty.   According to the same survey, 58 percent of customers will terminate the relationship without hesitation if customer service fails. More than two-thirds of customers want an organization to reach out and engage with proactive customer notifications.   In a scenario like this, an organization simply cannot afford to put the customer on the backburner. With such a wide range of CRMs and other customer service management technologies readily available, organizations have no choice but to be customer-centric.

What is customer-centricity?

Customer centricity simply means understanding your buyer persona, consolidating customer data with an efficient customer relationship management platform, and building a positive lifelong relationship with the customer.   A buyer persona is basically the customer data that gives insight into their buying behavior, interests, and engagements.   A CRM provides a complete 360 view of prospective and current customers; it uses data to provide valuable insights helping you provide the right packages, preferred products, deals, and subscriptions for your current customers and helping you create lead generation and sales strategies for your prospective customers.

Being customer-centric is broader than just customers and partners. In organizations, employees should treat their stakeholders as customers – to understand their challenges and help them navigate to success.

What stops a company from being customer-centric?

The era of social media marketing, the internet, and digital transformation has completely changed how customers interact with a company. Customers are pickier now more than ever, and the companies that will win are the ones who respect their customers and put them first.   

• But this is becoming a challenge, especially for older companies, since they are stuck with traditional data siloes where you cannot share customer information easily. For example, the sales department cannot immediately communicate a PO number with the marketing department; instead, they must gather information from their database and transfer it to the marketing department, which can take days.
• Companies don’t realize that you may use social media channels to reach out to customers, and it’s been estimated that 83 percent of online shoppers in the United States are impacted by their friends’ social media posts in their purchasing decisions.
• The fabric of the company does not align with the customer’s needs
• Companies are technically challenged
• The customer service staff are not trained or equipped to manage customer woes. They do not have experts who can perform data analysis and derive insights.

What can you do to overcome these challenges and become a customer-centric company?

Here is a quick look at the four best practices to become a customer-centric company.

Hire for customer success  
Because the right person can greatly impact the customer experience, it’s critical to hire the best people who are entirely aligned with customer-centric thinking. They need to be adequately trained with regular upskilling and learning from their peers.

Put relationships first

Acquiring new customers can be great, but you must strive to build a lifelong relationship first to be a customer-centric company. Sales and KPIs do not matter if you have not provided a positive customer experience or added value to their life.

Democratize customer data

The more data siloes in your organization means data is invisible to your employees, and since information is not available readily, they cannot serve their customers quickly. You can break this vicious cycle by democratizing data, i.e., making data easily available on a single plane as a single source of truth across all the departments.   You can achieve this only by adopting an efficient CRM software that consolidates all the customer data in one place that the employees can access with just a few clicks on their computer.  

Connect actions to outcomes

Motivate your employees by explicitly demonstrating which activities will result in which outcomes.   Assume you’ve implemented an AI-assisted lead generation strategy; the number of leads converted into prospects can be a success metric. You’ve demonstrated to your staff that employing AI insights for lead generation has successfully converted leads to prospects.

Finally, how do you measure if your strategies and steps to become a customer-centric company are a success?Finally, how do you measure if your strategies and steps to become a customer-centric company are a success?

These are the three primary metrics to measure the success of customer-centricity.

Churn Rate

It is the rate at which customers stop doing business with your organization.   It is a known fact that retaining customers leads to higher profits, and acquiring new customers can cost five times more than maintaining the existing customers. Hence businesses must understand why their customers leave them and why other customers remain loyal.   You can calculate the churn rate by measuring the number of customers who left in the last 12 months divided by the average number of total customers (during the same period).   Now you can assess why these customers left and come up with strategies to avoid this customer churn.

Net Promoter Score

You can determine if your customers are happy using this simple score, and all you have to do is ask a straightforward question.   How likely are you to suggest us to a friend or colleague based on your experience with us?  And your consumer gives you a rating on a scale of one to ten, after which you can categorize the responses using the following criteria.   Promoters (9-10): These individuals are enthusiastic about your product or service and will likely suggest you to future customers. Customers that give you a 9 or 10 are likely to become repeat customers with a high customer lifetime value.   Passives (7-8): People who give you a 7 or 8 are satisfied with their current relationship with your company, but they are the most likely to transfer to a competitor if a new or better product becomes available.   Detractors (0-6): These people are dissatisfied with your product or service and are likely to harm your brand’s reputation by telling their friends, family, and connections.  

Customer Lifetime Value (CLV)

It is the average revenue generated by a customer throughout their relationship with you, starting from their first purchase to the last one when they stop doing business with you.   CLV value assists you in determining the health of your customer relationships and also helps you value and invest more in long-term clients to cultivate long-term partnerships.  

Conclusion

Customer-centricity is the need of the hour and a necessity if your business must grow.   Adopting customer-centric business principles and goals and aligning your employees with these goals will help you create a company dedicated to its customers and seeks to provide an unforgettable experience.