How to become a customer-centric company

If there’s one thing every marketer knows these days, it’s this: Our companies need to be customer-centric.

It seems so straightforward. Customers demand personalization, so we give it to them. They use multiple devices, so we support them. They bring us a problem and we solve it. Except, if it’s really that easy, why do brands continue to struggle? Why, after many years of hard work and good intentions, are most companies still not as customer-centric as they hope to be?

What is customer centricity?

A customer-centric strategy is a business method that places the art of pleasing the customer at the highest levels of importance. Customer-centric strategies foster loyalty by offering unique, meaningful experiences for the customer. Businesses who employ these practices elevate their customers, placing them at the heart of their brand mission.

Communication and culture are the keys

It’s rarely the technology that’s holding us back. It’s nearly always people, process, leadership, and culture. It may come as a surprise, because why would our company cultures be resistant to changes that would delight our customers? Isn’t that exactly what leadership wants? Resisting customer-centricity just doesn’t make logical sense. So why do businesses keep doing it?

The answer is alignment and understanding. It’s easy to say Yes, we want to be more customer-centric! What’s hard is understanding how to do it. How do we serve customers in a way that’s best for them? How do we take mindsets and assumptions our marketing departments have been basing decisions on for years upon years and change them all in an instant?

Shifting to a customer-centric mindset

I found the answer while reading a parable-driven book called The Go-Giver: A Little Story About a Powerful Business Idea. The crux of the book’s message is something the author calls the “law of value,” which says, “Your true worth is determined by how much more you give in value than you take in payment.”

This is true for people, and it’s true for businesses. Our success hinges upon delivering—and over-delivering—value. We need to understand our customers’ purpose and help them fulfill it. This is the answer to the problem of culture change: We need to use customer purpose and value as the tools to drive alignment across our organizations.

How to put customer interests first and over-deliver

The book’s third law is another foundational truth for customer centricity: “Your influence is determined by how abundantly you place other people’s interests first.”

Which brings us to our next question: How? How can our businesses truly put customer interests first? In what ways can we deliver value? How do we understand customer purpose and help them fulfill it?

The simplest things that come to mind are these: We can reduce friction in the customer’s process of achieving their purpose. We can help them reach their goals (and even hurdle past them). We can safeguard their interests throughout the journey, even when their interests diverge from ours as a business. But ultimately, all of this starts with understanding our customers’ purpose. And that starts with mapping the types of customers we have across all the products and services we sell.

Understanding customers

What do I mean when I say we need to map our customers? The Five Whys Methodology, for example, encourages us to ask why five times, digging deeper into the problems we solve with each question.

Start by listing your products/services and drilling into each. What’s the purpose behind that product or service? What problem is a customer trying to solve with that product or service? Is there more than one problem? Are there multiple use cases? Next, use the methodology to peel back the onion and get to the heart of customer use.

Let’s say you’re selling puzzles. Why are people buying your puzzles? For your customers, it might be to relax and spend time with their families. So then you ask: Why do they need to relax and spend time with their families? The answer is that family life is busy and this is a chance for everybody to come together. It’s about family, fun, and togetherness.

You start to see the customer values behind the purchase emerge. From there, it’s a lot easier to map out your customer’s journey and figure out how to add more value along the way. And armed with all that knowledge, it’s also easier to build a customer data acquisition strategy that allows you to gather customer data incrementally through their purchase process and provide even more value.

In the case of our example above, maybe this means asking for their email in order to send a bi-weekly newsletter about family time—how to get more of it, how to keep it peaceful, how to keep kids engaged as they grow up. Once you understand what value the user needs, it’s time to incentivize your internal teams to understand and deliver on those values.

Systematizing your new understanding

Once you understand users, the challenge becomes organizing your data into a single, unified repository that can be leveraged across all customer touch points or channels. Simultaneously, you have to build a culture that uses data in a consistent way, progressively serving the customer purpose.

The more your operations and internal teams deliver customer value based on customer purpose—the more loyalty you’ll inspire in customers. Because who doesn’t want to buy again from a brand that understands and values them?

3 examples of brands focused on customer centricity

Adidas

Question: How can a company that sells shoes stand out?
Answer: By offering the most customer-centric experience possible.

So how did Adidas go about making this happen? They offered customers what other shoemakers weren’t – options! Sure, you have options with any shoe brand, but how far do they extend? Are they committed to customer engagement on the same level? With Adidas, the sky’s the limit. Customers have the chance to customize their shoes beyond their wildest imaginations. This means colors, words, and more. Not only that, they’ve seeked out people many aspire to and collaborated with them on shoes. Now people can buy shoes that their favorite celebrity helped design.

Amazon

Did you know that customers now expect EVERY retailer, online or not, to mimic the customer-centric traits of Amazon? That alone shows the power of a personalized, customer focus. It starts with the ease of Amazon’s purchase process, where customers simply add some items to their cart, click ‘order’ and wait.

However, it’s not the convenience of home-delivery that is driving Amazon’s success, as much as it is their real time personalization efforts. Whereas customers used to see upselling and cross selling efforts as rude and intrusive, Amazon has found the right balance between pushy and helpful.

Ikea

We’ve all experienced, or at least heard about, the difficult endeavor of putting together a piece of IKEA furniture. Somehow, this type of customer experience have brought focus onto IKEA, and that focus has been positive. What might seem to some as a hassle, is actually the result of customer-centric focus.

For example, it might be easier and less time-consuming (some people admit to spending entire days putting IKEA products together) to ship out less personalized equipment. However, IKEA focuses on providing the exact right thing for their customers, and the result is a little extra elbow grease to obtain what you want in the end, which is furniture that fits customer needs.

Making real progress with customer centricity

The truth is that customer-centric ideas have been around for a long time, but they’re rarely achieved. The biggest challenges are organizational ones, because the technology has outpaced our internal cultures and processes. Business-focused tech reduces complexity and makes marketing more effective. But without organizational alignment, without getting rid of silos, without changing our mindsets and focusing on delivering value, the tech itself can’t make us customer-centric.

Want to talk about how Lytics can help you with the tech side of becoming customer-centric? We’d love to set up a demo.