customer centric business plan

6 Ways to Build a Customer-Centric Culture

by Denise Lee Yohn

Summary .   

Companies have been trying to adopt customer centricity for nearly 20 years now. Yet only 14% of marketers say their company really focuses on customer centricity. To build a culture that focuses on customer needs, companies should take six steps: Operationalize customer empathy; hire for customer orientation; democratize customer insights; facilitate direct interaction with customers; link employee culture to customer outcomes; and tie compensation to the customer. Company leaders are starting to recognize that culture and strategy go hand in hand. Only when customer-centric strategies are supported and advanced by culture will a company realize its customer-centric vision.

Companies have been trying to adopt customer centricity for nearly 20 years now. But the CMO Council reports that “only 14 percent of marketers say that customer centricity is a hallmark of their companies, and only 11 percent believe their customers would agree with that characterization.”

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Customer-Centric Model: A Step-By-Step Guide

Does your company have a customer-centric culture?

More and more businesses are honing in on a customer-centric approach. There even exists a model for defining and planning a company’s customer centricity.

A customer-centric business model can enhance customer satisfaction, retain customers, bring in new ones, and boost sales.

With customer centricity, you begin by understanding your customer’s needs , desires, and expectations, and then frame your products, services, and campaigns to suit your customers’ needs. 

In this blog post, we’ll explain :

• The customer-centric business model
• The importance of incorporating customer centricity into your business processes
• The steps to make your business customer centric
• How to measure and quantify customer centricity

Happy reading!

Table of Contents

What Does It Mean to Be Customer-Centric?

A customer-centric business model refers to the process of doing business in a way that enhances customer satisfaction, not just during the initial stage, but throughout the customer lifecycle .

To make something centric is to put it at the center or forefront. Thus, when your business begins implementing customer-centric marketing or customer-centric selling, you’re focusing on the customer experience .

In other words, you’re looking at everything your company does from the customer’s viewpoint. What do they like? How do they prefer things? What do they need?

For instance, your customers might need a more responsive customer support. In that case, you’ll need to get a VoIP phone system which ensures you’re able to provide quick solutions to customer queries and offer maximum satisfaction.

The Customer-Centric Model

As we talked about in the intro, many businesses follow a customer-centric model. Here’s what a customer-centric model looks like.

Image courtesy of Relay42

As the illustration shows, a client-centric approach is a five-pronged one. Think of the model as a building.

To clarify how you should guide your company to make it a customer-centric organization, here is a deeper, more thorough explanation of each part of the consumer-centric model.

The leadership team’s responsibility is to brainstorm tasks and projects that revolve around your customers and foster customer centricity.

Also, your entire company should begin working to address customer concerns and solve their issues promptly.

Your company leadership holds up your company’s use of platforms, your processes , and the key people involved with your organization.

Here’s where it all begins. You need to focus on strengthening this area of your business first. Without strong leaders, it’s hard to brand your company and position yourself as a business your consumers can rely on for consistently high-quality products or services.

Once you feel more confident in your company’s leadership, you can work on defining what your strategy will be, which processes and platforms it will entail, and which members of your company will be the ones to drive it.

The work done on the leadership level is what begins to form your client-centric strategy. More than likely, the current business strategy your company is relying on could use some retooling so it meets more customer demands and increases customer centricity.

Here are some components that a workable customer-centric strategy should have:

• Long-term evaluations of success:  Short-term successes are not necessarily enough to determine how well your company is serving its customers and ensuring a great customer experience. These successes should also become longer-term if you want to retain your customers and build brand loyalty . Additionally, you need to define what your successes are to your company, how you track results, and whether what’s viewed as a success among your staff is perceived the same way by your customers.
• Interdepartmental customer satisfaction KPIs: If you’re all working towards the same goal — which is serving your customers to the best of your ability — then your customer-centric company must operate as one. That means that among all the departments, you should use the same key performance indicators or KPIs  to gauge what customer satisfaction looks like. The KPIs you need to focus on include:
• Net promoter score
• Customer lifetime duration
• Customer lifetime value
• Average journey completion time
• Customer effort score
• Task completion rate
• Escalation rate
• Customer churn rate
• Average resolution time
• Daily complaint numbers

At this point, you can move on to the next part of the customer-centric model: processes.

To have your company work based on customer centricity, you’ll need to define the processes necessary to get there. These processes will show you the direction to aim your sales and marketing campaigns.

Since a company’s processes are unique, this stage of the model differs from one business to another.

Ask yourself the following question to know if your workflows and processes follow the customer-centric model: Are you using customer insights to influence your product and project roadmaps?

If you said no, then you still have more work to do.

Do you currently deal with any obstacles that might prevent transmitting these customer experience insights from one department to another?

Besides the leadership team and your senior management, you can introduce other key members of your company into the fold as you work to be more consumer-centric.

It’s important that everyone is trained on what the new expectations are and the measures your company will take to reach these milestones.

You should also have resources that your customer-centric team can easily and reliably use when they need guidance or more information on any part of the customer journey or campaign.

From customer interviews to insights, customer feedback, buyer personas , and  customer profiles — these customer data will come in handy while making your company ‘customer centric’.

The last part of your consumer-centric journey through modeling is the platforms of choice. Your company, of course, has an array of tools, apps, and software you use daily.

To determine whether you want to keep using certain platforms moving forward, ask yourself a few important questions.

First, does the platform allow you to connect customer interactions and information to each customer profile and increase customer centricity?

Can you use the platform for traditional and digital channels alike? Does the platform allow you to keep  customer insights  along their journey? If yes, then it’s suitable.

Also read: What is Experiential Marketing (And Our Favorite Examples)

Why Is Customer Centricity Important?

Here are some reasons that will convince you to put in the time to rework your company processes to achieve complete customer centricity and deliver a great customer experience.

• Increased customer loyalty and potentially new customers
• Higher chances of sales
• Unhappy customers rarely talk about their dissatisfaction
• It costs more money to chase leads
• You could earn more profits

Let’s understand how.

Increased Customer Loyalty and Potentially New Customers

According to  Temkin Group’s The Ultimate CX Infographic, when your customers are happy with their purchase or experience with you, they have a 3.5 times higher chance of buying from you a second time.

These customers are also going to tell their friends and family about their customer experience five times more often compared to having bad experiences.

This could cause new leads to trickle into your funnel.

Understanding customer expectations, needs, and desires can help you gain trust, market better, and sell faster.

Higher Chances of Sales

When you’re happy with a company’s services and you feel you can trust them, are you more willing to buy from them? Of course.

The same logic applies to your customers. According to statistics from  LiveChat , your sales team has a 14 times higher chance of selling to a customer who’s already happy with their customer experience with you.

Unhappy Customers Rarely Talk about Their Dissatisfaction

If you look at the reviews page for any product or service, you’re bound to see some negative feedback sooner or later.

This can give you the expectation that when a customer has a bad  customer experience  with a company, they’ll be sure to say something.

Sure, some do, but it’s likely far fewer than you would have thought. According to a 2017  Huffington Post  article, out of 26 unhappy customers, only one will talk about their experience.

The other 25? They bail out.

Image courtesy of SuperOffice

When you stop to think about this, it makes sense. Whether a customer complains through an email,  live chat , by phone, or on social media, they’re still taking time out of their day to do it due to a bad customer experience.

You have to expect that most of your customers are busy people. Thus, though they may want to complain, they don’t get around to it.

It’s easier and faster to just abandon your company and never look back.

It Costs More Money to Chase Leads

All companies want to spend smartly, as a penny saved is a penny earned.

According to Huffington Post , it costs a company six to seven times more money to convert a lead than it does to retain a customer — meaning customer acquisition is more expensive compared to customer retention. 

You have to pull all the stops when courting a lead, such as research into segmenting,  personalized emails , follow-ups, and other tailored campaign elements. This doesn’t come cheap.

We’re not suggesting you abandon your influx of leads to keep your current customers onboard, just that you don’t disregard any customers because you have plenty of leads.

Your customers have already converted, meaning they’re interested in your products/services and are more willing to buy.

You don’t have that same luxury with your leads. You could get 1,000 leads in a day, but if only 50 of them are interested in your company’s products and services, then the other 950 ultimately don’t further your business.

That makes them far less valuable than your customers.

👉Empower your customer management with the best practices – learn more in our expert guide ! 💪

You Could Earn More Profits

In a guide from consultants  Brain & Company , it was found that boosting your customer retention rates by five percent is enough to drive profits way up, between 25% and 95%

By taking a more customer-centric approach, we’re confident you could increase customer retention way past that 5% mark, thus seeing profits that increase as the number of loyal customers does.

Read aslo: What Is Buyer Intent and How To Use It to Your Marketing Advantage?

How Do You Build a Customer-Centric Business Model?

So how do you create a customer-centric business? If you already own a business, how do you incorporate customer centricity?

Those numbers really resonated with you. You’ve realized that you’re missing out on loyal customers and more revenue by not following a client-centric approach.

You’re ready to begin prioritizing building customer centricity in your own company, but you’re not sure where to start.

Here are some customer-centric strategies your company can follow today:

• Focus on customer marketing
• Start a compensation program
• Start hiring more customer-centric employees
• Tap into customer empathy

Focus on Customer Marketing

Customer marketing is not your average type of marketing.

Favored by the likes of Apple and Amazon, customer marketing refers to promoting products and services that your customers deem valuable —  rather than the ones you think will be valuable to them.

You should use customer-centric marketing from the moment your customer buys something from you (post-purchase phase) all the way to the end of the journey.

The pillars of this marketing approach are advocacy, expansion, retention, and adoption.

Read Also: Outbound Marketing Tips to (re)Brand your Company [Updated]

• Adoption:  The adoption stage begins your post-purchase process. Adoption here refers to a customer becoming adapted to a service or product. You want this product or service to become a part of their everyday lives, and you can use in-app messaging and automated onboarding among your team to make it happen.
• Retention:  This next stage is about preventing churn, which is what happens when weary customers decide to stop using your products and services. This can cost the average company upwards of $1.6 trillion, so churn is certainly something you want to avoid.
• Expansion:  The third stage of the post-purchase process is expansion. This is about taking the customer you have now and expanding their customer journey so you can expect their repeated business for the next year, two, even three, or more. This can be done through a variety of ways, including upselling, cross-selling, extended warranties, and more.
• Advocacy:  Advocacy is about the means your company uses to  convert leads  so you have new customers beginning their journey.

With customer marketing, you promote products and services that your customers deem valuable —  rather than the ones you think will be valuable to them.

Start a Compensation Program

Another option you have for building a consumer-centric approach within your own company is to utilize a compensation program . Most customer-centric companies have some sort of compensation program to incentivize their employees while nurturing a customer-first environment.

This program connects employees to customers so every member of your staff has to make an effort.

Your compensation program should give employees financial bonuses for how adeptly they handle customers or for the number of customers retained.

With a compensation program, all members of your company will feel motivated to focus on customer satisfaction, as they’ll earn something out of the experience as well.

Start Hiring More Customer-Centric Employees

To streamline your customer-centric approach, you can also hire team members that already have a special focus on customers.

Whether your new hires were once customer service representatives or involved in human resources, they have the necessary skill set your customer-centric company is looking for as you begin to focus more on your customers  and their satisfaction.

Tap into Customer Empathy

To feel empathy for another person is not the same thing as sympathy. When you’re sympathetic, you feel bad for a person and that’s it.

To be empathetic transcends feeling bad and allows you to connect with that other person through shared experiences.

When you have empathy for your customer, it means you understand where they’re coming from and what they need in that specific situation. You also know why they need what they do because you can relate to them.

Having empathy puts you in the customer’s shoes, so to speak, so you can quickly and efficiently come up with a solution that suits their problem.

If your team members don’t practice empathy yet, company-wide training can change that.

Read also: Customer Success And All You Can Do For It

Customer-Centric vs Product-Centric: Understanding the Differences

Your company has begun working on its client-centric approach, yet you still feel like there are some kinks you have to work out.

How can you ensure you’re being more customer-centric than product-centric? Here are some ways to tell the differences between the two.

Your Approach Is Flexible

When you have a more product-centric approach, it’s typically one with less flexibility. You want to sell, and you have X amount of ways you go about doing that.

Compare that to an approach that’s more about your customers.

You understand that throughout the  customer journey , your customer’s needs are not necessarily the same from beginning to end.

You can be flexible enough to accommodate those changing needs so you’re always on top of what your customers want the most.

Your Process Are Streamlined

How you sell shows a lot about your brand. Do you focus on your products when you sell, or do you keep your customers in mind?

This can create instant problems, as there’s not necessarily an alignment between the customer’s needs and the product or service itself.

If the customer doesn’t need the product or service, the sales attempt will inevitably fail.

Instead of throwing a product at random (figuratively, of course) and seeing who’s interested, you look at your customer and what you know about them and then determine the best product/service for that individual.

Once you build up a good track record, you can keep going back to that same customer with different products and services that are also tailored for them and their needs.

Keeping in mind the flexibility that customer-centricity encompasses, this extends the  customer journey  far longer than a product-centric approach.

Customer centricity is not so one-and-done. Yes, you sold them Product A, but they haven’t seen Products B through E, and you think each of them could help your customer live a better life.

Read also: Perks & Examples of Customer Oriented Companies — Netflix, Slack & More

How Do You Measure Customer Centricity?

How do you know you’re doing it right? Here are some metrics you want to begin measuring right away.

Net Promoter Score

When you ask your customers if they’ll refer your services to someone else in their life, they’ll give you a score from 0 to 10. How high that score is would be your  net promoter score .

Ask your customers to rate how willing they are to recommend your products or services to someone else. Their answer is the Net Promoter Score.

Image courtesy of CustomerThink

If your customer answers low, such as 1 through 4, then they’re considered detractors. Between 7 and 9 are your passives, who have a more neutral approach.

Those who give your NPS survey a 9 or 10 are your promoters, as they’re the most willing to support your business in the future.

Customer Satisfaction

To achieve more customer centricity, you can also review your overall  customer satisfaction , which is abbreviated as CSAT.

The CSAT also uses a score system of 1 through 5, known as the Likert scale. This uses psychometrics to gauge how happy your customers are.

Here’s what your CSAT may look like.

Purchase Likelihood

This rather straightforward metric indicates the chances of your customers buying your products or services, either initially or in a repeat instance.

Customer Lifetime Value

We said before that it’s important to focus on the most valuable customers, but how do you know who they are? Through customer lifetime value, of course.

To determine customer lifetime value or CLV, you need to know how much money your customer spends on your products and services over the lifetime of their customer journey.

Then, take that number and multiply the business relationship length.

To  calculate customer lifetime value , figure out your average purchase value. Then take the average purchase value and multiply it with your company’s average purchase frequency rate.

Finally, calculate how much money you spent on conversions and then subtract that from your multiplied number to get your CLV.

Churn rate, also known as attrition rate, is the rate at which your customers are leaving you .

Here’s how you calculate churn rate: Lost customers / total customers at the beginning of the time period) x 100.

Let’s say you had a thousand customers at the start of 2021. At the beginning of 2022, you lost 100 customers. So, (100/1000)*100 = 10% annual churn rate.

Customer Lifetime Duration

How long will your customers stick with you? While you can never say for sure, you can use some math to get a gauge on how long you may expect to retain each individual customer.

This is known as customer lifetime duration.

Customer Lifetime Duration is crucial for understanding how long a customer will stay and also helps to predict the ebb and flow of your customer base. 

If you know that most customers stick around for about 18 months, you can plan your engagement strategies around that lifecycle. For instance, you might introduce a customer loyalty program at the one-year mark to encourage users to stay subscribed beyond the average 18 months. Or perhaps you could offer special promotions or exclusive content as the 18-month milestone approaches, aiming to extend that average duration. 

If you see the average duration shortening, it might be a sign that you need to inject some new energy into your customer base.

Read also: SaaS Business Model Working Explained

In a nutshell, you need to have a customer-centric business model to retain customers, have a strong and long-lasting relationship with them, and boost revenue.

In turn, you’ll have a more loyal customer base that is eager to recommend your products or services to others — thus driving in new customers.

To become truly customer centric, you need to understand customer needs and customer behavior on a much deeper level.

A customer relationship management (CRM) software aid you as you focus on your customers. There are dozens of CRM software in the market today.

For small businesses, EngageBay is a great option. EngageBay aligns marketing, sales, and customer support teams around a single view of your customer — the very essence of customer centricity.

The best part? EngageBay is one of the most affordable CRM software in the industry. You get a host of tools to improve customer satisfaction: all for less than a dollar a day!

Want to read reviews first? Read them on Capterra .

About The Author

Nicole Malczan

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How to Craft a Successful Customer-Centric Marketing Strategy

Updated: September 23, 2022

Published: February 17, 2022

When was the last time a business fully addressed your wants and needs as a customer? For me, it was around the holidays, while searching for the perfect gift to give a friend who is a huge fan of the video game series "The Legend of Zelda."

My online search for the right gift led me to STL Ocarina , a company that sells ocarinas — the musical wind instruments that have been around for thousands of years and a staple item in the Legend of Zelda series. Clearly, the company knew many of its customers were like me — either fans of the games or shopping for fans of the games — so it made finding Zelda-themed ocarinas on its website simple.

Just hover over the tab that says "Our Ocarinas," and the first category to pop up under the tab says "For Legend of Zelda Fans." From there, I was taken to a page displaying their Zelda-themed ocarinas and the option to include a songbook of the game’s music.

After purchasing the ocarina and songbook, I remembered my friend doesn’t know how to play the ocarina and the songbook may not have tips for beginners. Luckily, STL Ocarina’s confirmation email included a YouTube instructional video and links to online resources that will help him get started.

STL Ocarina serves as a great example of what customer-centric marketing looks like. During the few minutes I was on the company’s website, every touchpoint of my buyer journey was valuable, from landing on the website to browsing for the right gift to making a purchase.

Months later, I’m still recommending the website to friends who want Legend of Zelda merchandise or are simply looking for a new hobby to pick up.

In order for your company to turn customers into advocates, the same way I advocate for STL Ocarina, it’s important to add value to every part of the customer’s journey and to address their needs. A way to accomplish this is to create a solid customer-centric marketing strategy.

What is customer-centric marketing?

Customer-centric marketing is the practice of prioritizing the customers’ needs and interests in every interaction with your business, such as delivery, promotion, advertising, and more.

Customer-centric marketing ensures your customers are satisfied with their products or service enough to remain loyal and to tell others to become customers as well. To implement customer-centric marketing for your business, first ask yourself:

• How are customers connecting with your business? Is it via social media, the website, email, phone, or something else?
• Is there value being offered in each of these channels?
• What can be done to improve the customer’s experience at every touchpoint?

Customer-Centric Marketing Examples

Many companies have taken a customer-centric approach to their marketing strategy and have achieved great success. These companies include:

1. Starbucks

Image Source

One of the most well-known successful customer-centric marketing strategies comes from Starbucks with its Starbucks Reward Loyalty Program. This program offers a variety of perks, including exclusive discounts, free refills on brewed coffee, and free drinks for customers on their birthday. However, one of the program’s standout services is that it gives customers the ability to order and pay ahead of arriving at the restaurant.

This means customers who are pressed for time can schedule their items for pickup, thus avoiding long lines and inconsistent wait times.

According to Forbes , Starbucks attributed 40% of its total sales in 2019 to its rewards program. Forbes also reported users of the Loyalty Program’s app were 5.6 times more likely to visit a Starbucks every day.

2. Nordstrom

Luxury department store chain Nordstrom sought to improve its service and product discovery by creating a more streamlined and personalized shopping experience. The company achieved this by implementing its Nordstrom Analytical Platform . The platform consists of AI models that handle tasks such as inventory control and fulfillment, and routes orders to the nearest store.

The company also created fashion maps in which the AI uses natural language conversations, combined with images and information gathered from social media to predict customer preferences. Thanks to AI, the Nordstrom Analytical Platform offers personalized products and selections for customers via its Looks feature, storyboards, and more.

Back in 2019, Bacardi wanted to get potential customers in the UK and Germany excited about the brand’s new single-malt whiskies. Understanding drinkers in that demographic often have a taste for luxury, Bacardi teamed up with Amazon to create a live whisky tasting customers can enjoy from the comfort of their home.

The spirits company created its Single Malt Discovery Collection, which was made up of three whiskies exclusively for tasting. Customers in the UK and Germany could purchase the collection from Amazon and, in turn, receive access to the live streamed tasting. During the live stream, customers were able to ask questions to the host via a custom landing page on Amazon. More than 500 questions were asked and Bacardi saw an increase in sales on Amazon .

Tips for Creating a Strong Customer Centric Marketing Strategy

Crafting a customer-centric marketing strategy for the first time can be daunting, but it doesn’t have to be. Here’s how to get started:

1. Get Leadership Involved

To help ensure the success of any new strategy, it’s important to get the support and enthusiasm of senior leadership. If senior leaders prioritize customers at every channel and interaction, it will encourage others in the organization to do the same. You can get leadership on board by hosting regularly scheduled meetings to educate leadership on customer-centric marketing, discuss upcoming campaigns, and brainstorm creative ways to promote the brand.

2. Learn About Your Customers

Gain a better understanding of your customers by doing some of the following:

• Conduct surveys asking customers about the quality of the service/product, the company’s strong points, where it can improve, and how they most interact with the brand.
• Have one-on-one interviews with current and former customers asking about their experience with the company, why they choose to remain loyal, or why they left. You can also ask former customers what changes would have made them stay.
• Use data gathered from analytics tools to track customer behavior.
• Monitor social media and/or enable Google Alerts so that you can see what people are saying about your business online. For example, if customers often take to Twitter to complain about how difficult it is to navigate your website, that could be a sign to update the site. You can also gauge the type of content your customers like to see on social media. Perhaps on TikTok you notice followers enjoy behind-the-scenes videos, while customers on Twitter enjoy having their questions answered or reading important announcements.
• Read through customer emails and monitor calls to see how customers are interacting with your company.

3. Add Value to Every Customer Interaction

Customers, or potential customers, can be at any stage of their journey with your company, which is why it’s important to create appeal at every touchpoint. Whether they interact with your organization via social media, are calling to get help with a problem, or they are at the end stage of purchasing a product/service, every part of the buyer’s cycle should spark engagement and joy.

Nordstrom offering personalized products/services based on the customer’s behavior, and Starbucks creating a system that allows customers to get their needs met quickly and efficiently are great examples of adding value at different customer interactions. Same can be said for Bacardi’s virtual, at-home whisky tasting. The one thing that all of these actions have in common is that they make the customer experience fun, engaging, and simple.

The Value of Customer-Centric Marketing

As technology continues to change the way people interact with brands and businesses, the customer journey has become less linear. To keep up with the ever-evolving journey, companies must adopt a customer centric marketing approach to build stronger relationships that will turn your customers into some of its strongest advocates.

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More From Forbes

Customer-centricity: principles, practices and outcomes.

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Customer-centricity is an often-misused term, but it actually has a pretty straightforward definition: Put the customer at the forefront of everything the business does. That means that you take the time to understand your customer and don’t make any decisions without thinking of the impact it could have on her.

I often like to say: No discussions, no decisions, no designs without bringing in the customer and her voice, without asking how it will impact the customer, how it will make her feel, what problems it will help her to solve, what value it will create and deliver for her.  

To get your company thinking differently, you have to first know and embrace the principles and the practices of customer-centricity, and you have to ensure that they remain aligned to achieve the desired outcomes of designing such an organization.

The following outlines the eight principles of customer-centricity and their corresponding practices.

1. Culture: Culture = Core Values + Behavior. You have to have the core values in place to support a customer-centric culture. You must deliberately design a culture of customer-centricity. And that only happens when there’s a commitment from the top to put the customer and the customer experience front and center. It then shifts the organization’s mindset, behavior, and ultimately, the culture.

The values must be socialized and operationalized . Acceptable behaviors must be outlined to help employees and executives know what it means to be customer-centric. And no processes or policies should be developed without the values (and, hence, the customer) in mind.

2. Employee Experience: You cannot be customer-centric without putting employees first. We know that the employee experience drives the customer experience, so you have to design and deliver a great experience for employees first in order for them to take on customer-centric behaviors.

Putting employees more first means that you will take the time to understand your employees, their needs and their pain points so that you can design a great experience for them. This includes ensuring they have the tools, training, resources, processes and policies to be customer-centric.

3. People Before Products:  Customer-centric companies put the customer into all they do, including when they design products and services. For whom are you developing the product if you don’t consider the customer and understand what problems your product will solve for her?

As such, you must bring your understanding of customers’ needs, problems to solve and jobs to be done into product design and development. Help your customer solve problems; don’t just create products and add features and functionality (which often add complexity) without customer understanding.

4. People Before Profits: Customer-centric companies take a different stance when it comes to business. They realize that when they take care of their people, the numbers will come.

They approach business from a different lens: They focus on taking care of employees and delivering a great employee experience, understanding the employee experience-customer experience connection. They create and deliver value for their customers and for the communities around them, knowing that the outcome is that shareholders will achieve value, too. They look at the full equation, not just on that latter component.

5. People Before Metrics:  I often cite Bain’s delivery gap and, importantly, the reasons for that gap when I offer up this principle. When companies have a disproportionate focus on growth (i.e., acquisition over retention), then they are focused on metrics to satisfy analysts and shareholders. And when companies focus on moving the needle on their customer metrics (e.g., net promoter score or customer satisfaction), they do things differently and do different things than when they focus on the people and doing what’s right for them (resulting in a moved needle).

You must shift the balance to focus more on doing what it takes to retain customers. That means focusing on the customer experience. The metrics will come.

6. Customer Understanding:  Customer-centric companies know that customer understanding is the cornerstone of customer-centricity. You cannot bring the customer and her voice into the business if you don’t take the time to listen to her, get to know her better, and understand her pain points, problems to solve, and jobs to be done.

You can achieve customer understanding in three ways: listening (feedback and data), characterizing (research-based personas), and empathizing (journey mapping with customers).

7. Outside-In Thinking Versus Inside-Out:  Customer-centric leaders must acknowledge, accept, and advocate for bringing the customer voice into all they do. That’s outside-in thinking and doing. When leaders use inside-out thinking and doing, they believe they know what’s best for customers and act on their ideas and thoughts rather than on customer feedback and input. This is the antithesis of customer-centricity!

Remove the phrase “We think customers …” from your corporate vocabulary and replace it with “We know customers …” because you actually know customers! You’ve done the work.

8. Platinum Rule Over Golden Rule: You might be shocked to read that statement, but the Golden Rule is also the antithesis of customer-centricity. It states: Treat others the way you would want to be treated. That’s inside-out thinking and doing; that says that you assume to know how others want to be treated.

Instead, shift the behaviors and use the Platinum Rule: Treat others the way they want to be treated. Again, you can do this because you’ve done the work to understand your customers.

If you think focusing on culture as a solid foundation for your business is all fluff, consider this: Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business conducted some culture research a few years ago, the details of which are outlined in two papers: " Corporate Culture: Evidence from the Field" and " Corporate Culture: The Interview Evidence ." The benefits and the outcomes are real, for employees, for customers and for the business!

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What is customer centricity and why is it important.

16 min read In a post-pandemic consumer landscape, customer centricity is more vital than ever. Learn about why putting customers first is vital for business growth, and how you can create a customer centric culture in your organization.

What is customer centricity?

Customer centricity is the practice of putting customer experience first throughout an organization’s actions and attitude.

Often, it’s seen as a brand culture or mindset shift, but in practice, it is more of a business-wide strategy that requires more than just considering what customers are looking for.

To do more than just keep customers in mind, businesses need to consider customer needs and wants as the most important factor when planning to take any action. From product development to the individual steps in the customer journey , customer centricity should permeate every facet of your business decisions and action.

Free eBook: 2024 global consumer trends report

Customer centricity vs customer friendliness

Peter Fader, a Wharton marketing professor and author of The Customer Centricity Playbook and Customer Centricity , has suggested that often companies are customer-friendly, but not customer centric. Rather than focusing on individual customers, a brand’s customer base is treated as a whole, with actions applied equally to each customer with expectations of similar outcomes.

Customer centricity, he argues, is about understanding customers on a granular level. Which are the most valuable customers, and what do they want or prefer? Which communication preferences do they have, what experiences do they expect, and what drives them to make the purchases they do?

By focusing on customer centricity rather than being customer friendly, brands can improve their ROI and provide better, more personalized campaigns and tailored customer experiences.

Why is customer centricity important?

Consumers now expect businesses to focus on the customer experience. They want their wants, needs, and opinions to be reflected in their relationship with brands, from customer centric marketing to interactions with customer service reps. In 2022, 63% of consumers told us that brands needed to do a better job of listening to feedback on customer experience. In 2023, we found that 36% of consumers are still not happy with the level of empathy shown in their customer service interactions with brands.

It’s clear taking a customer centric approach is something that customers now expect. But how do you go about creating a customer centric culture, and what are the potential business impacts of taking this action? Read on to find out.

What are the business benefits of being a customer centric company?

Creating a customer centric organization isn’t just about customer benefits. A customer centric business can expect increased customer loyalty and subsequent financial returns, as well as greater competitiveness when it comes to new customer acquisition.

Customers will spend more when they feel heard

When businesses create meaningful experiences that take customer feedback into account, customers feel heard – and are willing to spend more. 62% of consumers said that businesses need to care more about them, and 60% stated they’d be willing to buy more if they did feel cared for . Putting customers at the forefront of your brand actions means customers have better experiences that better reflect what they expect.

Personalization pays dividends

Providing a positive customer experience that is customer centric, rather than generic, is financially rewarding for businesses. Brands that grow more rapidly receive 40% more revenue from a personalized approach than their less successful rivals.

When your brand doesn’t personalize services to customers, it means you risk infuriating your customer base and damaging customer satisfaction – 76% of customers get frustrated when they aren’t given a personalized experience . Personalization and customer centricity is key to keeping loyal customers and attracting new ones.

Customer centric businesses get ahead of their competitors

Research from the Qualtrics XM institute found that the gap in stock prices between customer experience (CX) business leaders and customer experience laggards grew from 24% points in 2019 to 66% points by the end of 2021 . The cost of ignoring customer needs is clear – there is a financial impact when customer centricity isn’t a key business value. Compete with your market rivals by joining the ranks of customer centric companies.

Increased customer loyalty and lifetime value

Customers that can see they are heard and appreciated by businesses are more likely to come back for similar experiences, rather than seeking new ones elsewhere. With the cost of acquisition likely being higher than the cost of customer retention , it makes sense to increase loyalty and customer value by investing in creating better, more customer centric experiences with your brand.

Creating and implementing a customer centric strategy for your organization

When to create and enact a customer centric strategy.

The right time to become a customer centric business is now – the best time was yesterday. However, customer centricity is not just a lip-service action – becoming a customer centric business means enacting change throughout your organization. This requires planning and likely time to ensure that actions taken are worthwhile, both from a financial standpoint and as an enduring change.

How to create a customer centric strategy

To form a better understanding of what you need to do to become a customer centric organization, you’ll need to go through a few key steps.

Gather customer data

Examining your customer data and feedback is the best way to ensure you’re heading in the right direction with your strategy. There’s little use in creating a customer centric approach, only to find it doesn’t meet customer expectations.

Your customer data can be collected from various sources within your organization. These might include:

• Customer survey feedback, such as Net Promoter Score (NPS) responses
• Customer behavior data, such as transaction history
• Front-line feedback from customer service employees
• Website analytics tools
• Social media platforms
• Third party review sites
• Loyalty program data
• Subscriptions to brand marketing, such as newsletters
• Text analysis on call transcripts, chat, SMS, emails and other feedback
• User testing results

Understand your customers through data-led insights

By gathering this information, you can begin to spot patterns and link customer’s feedback in their own words with actions your company has taken. Feeding your customer data into a customer experience platform that can distill data into insights can be a faster way to see the patterns in customer behavior and begin strategizing the action that needs to be taken.

Insights you might pull out include:

• Future predictions of customer needs, based on past behavior trends
• Which channels customers prefer to use, and for which activity (e.g. reaching out to customer service representatives)
• What customer relationship actions will have the best ROI, with the greatest impact from the smallest effort
• How to improve personalization at scale by customer segmentation
• How to retain customers beyond the first purchase and increase customer lifetime value

Develop your strategy and set goals

The data-led insights you develop as part of this process will give you ideas as to where you can make the most impact for the least amount of investment. Once you have a clear view of which actions will have the greatest results, you can develop your strategy and set goals.

For example, if your user testing and customer feedback has indicated that your payment page is confusing, you can reduce the number of drop-offs at that stage in the customer journey by making the page more user-friendly.

Your company actions and goals could be to:

• Ask your web development team to work on user experience
• Ask your marketing team to make it clear that feedback has been taken into account to your customers
• Ask your customer experience team to gather more feedback post-action to see the impact that was made
• Ask your customer service reps to flag payment issues in future
• Review customer data post-action to see if this had a positive impact on sales and revenue, cart abandonment rates and customer calls
• Monitor your KPIs such as customer satisfaction post-action for signs of improvement
• Repeat the process of finding and taking action on customer insights

How to implement your customer centric strategy

Implementing your customer centric strategy is a company-wide process, and one that more companies will adopt as the benefits become clear. Get ahead of the competition by dedicating your brand to implementing a strategy that pays dividends. Here are our suggested actions:

Create a customer centric culture across the entire business

Overall, your business strategy should adhere to a customer centric company vision. This helps to make it clear to everyone within your business that your overall company goal is to put customer satisfaction first in every action taken.

Areas in which you could focus your strategy include:

• Customer centric marketing, with the aim of encouraging customers to become promoters to others through word of mouth
• Customer centric selling, with products and services offered reflecting what customers indicate they need and want
• Customer centric thinking, encouraging suggestions and regular feedback from employees to help improve customer relationships

Build in customer centricity from day one

Your employees are often the best proponents of your customer centric approach, and it makes sense to instill a sense of customer centricity from the very beginning of their work with your brand.

You might try engaging in:

• Customer focused hiring practices, finding employees that also share a customer centric approach to doing their work
• Customer centric personnel development , with customer centricity built into your employee evaluations as a KPI
• More customer focused onboarding practices , with your vision for customer centricity made clear

Common challenges for customer centricity

A lack of leadership buy-in.

Customer centricity starts from the top down. Without leadership buy-in and guidance, brands can often find that customer centricity falls behind other priorities. To avoid this, you’ll need to ensure that management engages with the idea of a customer centric culture, spreading support throughout their teams.

As managers, you’ll need to make it clear that each customer centric action contributes to other business goals by connecting key customer centric objectives with business and organizational KPIs. Customer centricity isn’t a one-off project, after all – it’s an ongoing process that adapts as the market and consumers change. Leadership will need to ensure that initial dedication continues over time.

Organizational silos

When a business’s marketing, sales, operations, customer service function and more work in silos, it can be difficult to share one customer centric vision. Ensuring that vital customer relationship management isn’t one team’s responsibility, but everyone’s, can help to foster customer centricity across the whole business. To help teams to communicate effectively for better customer success, create cross-functional groups across various teams and share insights from customer data widely. Your aim is to create a customer centric brand, rather than just implement customer-focused actions in individual areas.

A product or service focus, rather than a customer centric focus

Working on products or services in isolation from a sales and marketing approach doesn’t reflect real-world customers. For example, take a customer who has purchased two different products with a financial organization such as a bank. They don’t want to have to deal with different teams for each individual product or service they use – they want a unified account overview, with customer service reps aware of all their past interactions with the business.

Moving away from a product or service focus towards customer centricity helps to break down silos, encourages customers to find new products and services from across your brand and helps you to condense operations. It’s a win-win from a customer outcomes and a business point of view.

Inadequate or legacy technology

Bringing customer data together from disparate digital channels is difficult without the right technological support. Inadequate systems that can’t analyze customer data in depth can limit the granular study of customer behavior and drivers that’s needed for a truly customer centric approach. When legacy systems aren’t integrated, important information isn’t delivered cross-team or is kept hidden in silos.

Analysis and the dissemination of vital insights to the right teams at the right time can be greatly supported with the right technology. A customer experience platform, such as Qualtrics Customer XM, can help you to not only gather all relevant customer data, but bring your teams together to work on customer centricity as a whole.

Measuring the success of your customer centric approach

Developing an action plan and goals is only part of creating customer centricity in your organization. You will also need to measure the success you’ve had in meeting your goals. This will help you to make better future decisions, based on successful actions taken over time.

Important customer centric metrics that can be monitored over time could include:

• Net Promoter Score (NPS): How likely is it your existing customers would recommend you to others before and after the strategy has been implemented?
• Customer Satisfaction (CSAT) score: How satisfied are your customers with your products, service and experience?
• Customer Effort Score (CES): How hard is it for your customers to complete actions, and how have your actions impacted this effort?
• Your sales rate: Have sales improved since implementing your actions?
• Your customer lifetime value (CLV): Has customer value increased following your customer centric approach?
• Customer loyalty program signups: How successful has your customer loyalty program been post-strategy?
• Customer support: Have customer support metrics (time to resolution, cost per serve) improved since enacting your strategy?

How to ensure your strategy evolves with customer needs

Customer centric best practices are to continually monitor progress, and evolve with customer needs over time. Becoming a customer centric business is an ongoing process that requires constant review.

Rather than taking a static or regularly-scheduled approach to evaluation, use real-time insights to ensure that your teams are working towards current customers’ expectations. With constant monitoring, business-wide KPIs and an adaptive strategy, you can ensure that your brand is always evolving to meet customer needs.

This also helps you to meet new customers’ expectations. By consistently analyzing and predicting behavior based on loyal customer trends, you can replicate successful actions for new customers and develop quicker steps to customer retention.

Creating customer centric experience with Qualtrics

Developing customer centric thinking across your organization and understanding how your actions make an impact doesn’t have to be difficult.

With the Qualtrics Customer XM platform, you can tailor each customer’s experience at scale. Hear all customer feedback, no matter where it’s shared. Use powerful analytics and predictive intelligence to collect vital data and transform it into targeted action for better business outcomes.

Related resources

Customer data platforms 14 min read, customer experience insights 12 min read, customer relationship building 12 min read, customer equity 11 min read, ai and customer experience 17 min read, customer experience transformation 15 min read, customer lifecycle management 18 min read, request demo.

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6 Proven Strategies for Building a Customer-Centric Company

Despite the data showing that investing in customer service drives better business results, building a truly customer-centric company still takes courage.

True customer centricity requires a deliberate commitment to principles that may run counter to short-term, cost-cutting tactics that are easier to connect to the bottom line.

To build a customer-centric company, you must commit to a set of values — and instill them across your entire organization — that put customers first and foremost in all decisions.

It's not easy, and it doesn't always come naturally. But if you succeed, it will directly and positively impact your bottom line.

What does it mean to be customer centric?

Being customer centric means focusing every aspect of your business — from marketing and sales to product development and support — on customer needs and interests, prioritizing customers' long-term successes over short-term business goals.

Consider all the times you've received dehumanizing service from a company that prioritizes nickel-and-diming their customers over delivering a positive customer experience :

The airline that gouged you when you had to change your travel plans due to a family emergency.

The cable company that rescheduled three times and still didn’t show in the four-hour window you took off from work to meet them.

The retailer that failed to ship your partner's birthday gift on time and took another week to respond to your calls and emails.

Did you feel valued as a customer, not to mention as a living, breathing human being with needs, plans, a budget, and an entire life that's already complex enough?

Not every company takes a customer-centric approach. And despite how it may sound, we're not here to judge.

The reality is that it's entirely possible to grow a successful business without taking a customer-centric approach. Consider a telecommunications company that holds a virtual monopoly in a given region; their customers may have no other option. In other cases, customers value a low price above anything else, including service quality.

Different approaches can work for different business models, and where you position your business will vary depending on your market and the customers you are targeting. But in almost all cases, customer centricity is a powerful way to stand out from your competition.

Relational vs. transactional service models

Transactional companies are focused on single, one-off interactions with their customers. A customer makes a one-time purchase or submits a single support request and gets an answer; then, the company-customer relationship ends.

On the other hand, relational companies focus on developing long-term relationships with their customers. They take time to understand customers' needs and motivations and recommend solutions that meet those needs. If a perfect solution doesn't exist at the moment, they may even create one, following up with the customer later to let them know there's a better solution.

A transactional company might try to upsell you when purchasing because the goal is to make as much money as possible in each interaction. The goal is short-term revenue generation — not the creation of lifetime customers.

Instead of upselling, a relational company might recommend a product it makes less money on because it better meets a customer's needs. The sales rep gets to know you, takes their time with you, and recommends the best solution because when you have a demand for their products again, you're much more likely to return to the place where you were treated well.

Transactional may seem like a negative way to describe a relationship, but we all experience positive transactional relationships with specific businesses. For example, both sides are happy with a transactional relationship when ordering fast food or streaming a movie.

But relational companies see customer centricity as a growth opportunity and a competitive differentiator. Generally, they don't require a spreadsheet to tell them putting customers first is the right thing to do — they put customers first because they understand the long-term value of a great customer experience.

Why is customer centricity important?

Data from a variety of studies show that customer centricity improves financial performance and provides a competitive advantage:

Seven of 10 U.S. consumers say they've spent more money to do business with a company that delivers excellent service.

Increasing customer retention rates by 5% increases profits by more than 25% .

It is anywhere from five to 25 times more expensive to acquire a new customer than to keep a current one.

U.S. consumers are willing to spend 17% more to do business with companies that deliver excellent service.

The ROI of creating an outstanding customer experience more than pays for itself.

And customers aren't the only beneficiaries; building a customer-centric company also empowers employees to make good decisions and to do their best work, so customer centricity is both a growth strategy and a way to build a strong company culture.

Examples of customer-focused behavior

There are many real-life examples of customer-focused behavior out in the world , but here are a few of our favorites.

Blue River Technology considers customer feedback

The founder of Blue River Technology, Lee Redden, thought he had come up with a winner when he was a student of the Lean LaunchPad and founded his company that designed large-scale riding lawn mowers. 

As part of the program, Redden was tasked with doing customer research and was required to talk to 15 customers a week, sourcing feedback about his ideas. Three weeks into the process, he pivoted and changed his plans. As scary as it might have been, Blue River Technology has now received $13 million in funding , all due to asking for customer insights and changing its business strategy to address what customers were really looking for.

MeUndies engages customers with autoresponders

MeUndies sets the gold standard when it comes to customer experience. They are so customer focused that most of their standard customer support features, such as contact forms, autoresponders, and returns, are delightful. In this case we'd like to highlight the autoresponder that they send to every email into their inbox:

Hi smith.mercer,

It worked! You sent us a message, and we got it. That's all this email is. To let you know that. And to let you know you should see a response from us within the next 2-4 days.

If you are looking for a more immediate solution, check out our live chat to talk to a real person.

Or if you don't want to talk to us, you can always check out our Help Page where you will find answers to a lot of questions. Not all the questions…but a lot: https://help.meundies.com/hc/en-us/

It's sweet and funny, and it conveys a ton of information to the reader.

Disney takes personalization to the next level

Most companies have some data stored when it comes to their customers. For many, it's just browsing data, payment history, and logs on past support inquiries. Disney, however, aggregates more than you might expect. For instance: The business applied for a patent to collect customer data by scanning guests' shoes , which it could use to gain insights into the most common paths between rides, where guests spend the most time, and other logistical information.

From their immersive experiences to their personalized photo packages, the Disney company takes a holistic, customer-centric approach to doing business.

8 best practices for building a customer-centric company

Now that we've covered the why, let's look at the how. Here are six strategies for building a customer-centric company and creating lasting, loyal relationships with your customers.

1. Invest in customer service

Customer-centric companies don't see customer support as a cost of doing business; instead, it's a revenue generator. Their support teams are the driving force behind company growth.

Your support team is closest to your customers. They're talking to customers every day and helping them achieve their goals. There's no better team to undergird everything you do and every decision you make as a company.

Building a customer-centric company requires you to invest significant time and resources in your support team so they're not always just fighting to empty a queue. That means prioritizing:

Hiring excellent people.

Paying customer support agents more.

Treating them as the proactive, empowered, revenue-generating professionals they are.

Eschewing metrics like first response time in favor of measuring customer happiness or customer effort.

Maximizing your potential with self-service support .

Staffing so that people can spend 20% to 40% of their time outside the queue.

Those investments will create the space to elevate your support team to deeper and more proactive conversations with your customers.

Try the customer support platform your team and customers will love

Teams using Help Scout are set up in minutes, twice as productive, and save up to 80% in annual support costs. Start a free trial to see what it can do for you.

2. Get everyone in the company involved in support

It's hard for non-support team members to put customers first when they never directly interact with customers. That's why many customer-centric companies have adopted the practice of whole company support — having everyone in the company spend time in the support queue helping customers.

Help Scout co-founder and CTO Denny Swindle says, "Support teams can too often be used to shield the rest of the company from customer issues and complaints. But if you're an engineer building the product, you should want to know where users are getting confused or blocked."

Denny continues: "This gives you empathy for your support team members, so when you're developing a feature, you have both the customer and support team at the back of your mind.

"You can also see the common issues, complaints, and requests that customers write in about. As engineers, if you have those themes in your head, you can think of them when you're developing new stuff, and you can incorporate them into the things you're already developing."

Whole company support allows engineering teams to step away from code and hear from people using the product. It also allows marketing teams to encounter objections and become more informed about how customers perceive the product.

The result is a better understanding of how customers think and what issues they are struggling with, which significantly improves customer happiness and loyalty.

3. Actively solicit customer feedback

As Kathy Sierra describes in Badass: Making Users Awesome , your customers don't care about your product or service much — they care about what it helps them accomplish. Your job is to help customers succeed in the context of their jobs.

CX expert Don Peppers echoes that statement in his post called Explaining Customer Centricity With a Diagram : "Assuming that you start with a quality product and service, being customer centric means understanding the customer's point of view and respecting the customer's interest."

Listening to customers is an inherent part of being customer centric. It's tough to know how to improve the customer experience if you don't have a system for regularly collecting customer feedback.

You'll find that customers can help you build a product that other customers love. While they can't singlehandedly steer your development toward innovation, a truly customer-centric company will take advantage of the fact that their customers often know what they want.

There's an even deeper benefit to asking and listening. As you ask for feedback and your customers offer it, you boost your chances of achieving a high customer satisfaction rate. Your insights will be more meaningful and bountiful, and your customers will be happier.

4. Sweat the small stuff

"There are certain aspects of a business that elicit trust and connection," says Help Scout co-founder and designer Jared McDaniel. "For me, what sets companies apart is the effort put into the final 10% (which often requires 90% of the work).

"Whatever area it's in — product, business, or culture — when you demonstrate that level of attention to detail, it highlights that nothing you do is by accident, that you're paying attention. It shows that you care."

Jared is ecstatic when customers tout their love for Help Scout, even if they can't pinpoint exactly why: "I believe they love it because they've experienced each and every one of those touchpoints in a positive way, and it makes them feel respected as a user and ultimately connected to the brand."

He continues, "We're not only in the business for our customers; we're in the business for their customers, too."

Jared believes that excelling in the last 10% is the real game changer, especially in a crowded market with bigger budgets and larger teams. "You have to differentiate in nuanced areas of the business to truly stand out."

He concludes, "So whether it's a headline or an email, a free resource or a paid feature — all of those pieces need to work together and require a team of people that really care about making them happen. That's what I think creates an experience and a brand that customers stick with."

“We’re not only in the business for our customers, we’re in the business for their customers, too.”

5. Treat your company culture as an asset

One part of building a customer-centric company is valuing your customers; the other part is valuing your employees. In addition to fostering meaningful and empathetic relationships with your customers, you must also extend that empathy and care to your team. Here's how:

Start at the top. If you want your team to care about customers, start prioritizing it at the top. Don't just say that you value excellent service or write it in a memo; live it. Reward it regularly, recognizing those who go above and beyond. Make it clear to everyone that customers have a say at your company. A customer-centric approach is a way of doing business that fosters a positive customer experience at every stage of the customer journey.

Hire people who fit. When evaluating potential new hires, consider whether or not they share your company values. Do your best to build a team of people who are enthusiastic about helping your customers thrive.

Trust your team. Everyone likes to take ownership of their job. Empower your employees to make decisions independently and delight customers in the ways they feel are best.

Establish good lines of communication. Make sure it's easy for everyone to communicate and stay on the same page so that nobody feels like they're facing a complex problem alone.

Show gratitude. Above all, remember to thank your employees regularly and show them how much you appreciate their intentional work in caring for customers.

6. Structure your business to enable customer centricity

In The Good Jobs Strategy , Zeynep Ton looks at how companies like Southwest Airlines, In-N-Out Burger, Costco, and Trader Joe's have lowered customer costs and increased business profits by investing in their employees. Having a customer-centric approach goes beyond how you interact with customers; it also relates to the internal culture you build within the company.

Employees at Costco are paid 40% more than employees at competitor Sam's Club. Ninety-eight percent of Costco’s store manager positions are filled internally, and turnover for employees who stay more than a year is 5.5% — significantly lower than the industry average of 59%.

This goes against the typical approach in the retail industry of understaffing stores and paying employees as little as possible to boost profits. But Costco has been highly successful with its good jobs approach: Its gross profits have increased yearly for the last three years — nearly 23% from 2017 to 2020 .

In her book, Ton clarifies that this type of success requires more than just well-paid and highly trained staff. Over 10 years ago, Costco worked on business-wide operational improvements to support their higher service costs, simplifying their business by offering fewer items and running more periodic promotions, for example, which made it easier for floor staff to run the stores.

Building a customer-centric company starts with creating an employee-centric company. When you pay your employees well, don't overwork them in favor of your bottom line, and empower them to delight customers at every opportunity, customer centricity becomes a natural part of how your business operates.

7. Personalize your experience

No matter your business, you likely have at least some information about your customers. Use that to create a personalized experience that draws customers or potential customers in.

There are many ways to make personalization work for you — you don't have to automatically go straight to displaying products based on users' browsing history. Instead, consider customizing newsletters to the specific segments of your user base or adding additional recommendations in your support responses that may help.

For instance, if a customer reaches out to you about having trouble purchasing your product, respond to them to rectify the problem and include information about what they might be interested in doing after purchasing. This forethought makes your customers feel appreciated and seen.

Customer data is super important, and using it correctly is crucial to building a customer centric approach.

8. Meet your customers where they are

The companies that offer the best customer experience prioritize fitting themselves into the customers' lives, not the other way around. Instead of forcing your customers to come to you, meet them where they are.

So, if a customer reaches out on social media, answer inquiries in that channel instead of sending them a contact form and asking them to reach out there. If you cannot answer customer inquiries directly in the channel where they reach out, try to make it as easy as possible to get where they need to go. For example, if you cannot provide support directly on social media, create an easy path to transfer them to a better channel without the customer needing to reiterate their question and any additional details.

A fundamental tenet of excellent customer experience is taking as much work and effort off the customer's plate as possible. That means being present and available anywhere that they might reach out.

How do you measure customer-centric culture?

As wonderful as it would be to have a direct metric to understand how customer centric your team is, unfortunately, it doesn't exist. Instead, use lagging indicators to determine how your choices impact your customers. For instance, if you engage and address customer centricity, you may start to see a lift in specific metrics after the fact. 

Here are a few metrics to keep an eye on:

Customer satisfaction score (CSAT)

Net promoter score (NPS)

Customer happiness

Churn rate decrease

Retention rate

Customer lifetime value (LTV)

None of these measurements alone indicate customer centricity, but as they start to collectively trend upward, it means that changes to customer strategy are having a positive impact.

The benefits of customer centricity

A customer-centric growth strategy doesn't always fit easily into a spreadsheet, but that doesn't mean you shouldn’t invest in it. Building a customer-centric company is good for your customers, your employees, and your bottom line. If your business operates in a competitive market, you might be up against companies with more money and bigger teams, but you'll thrive on the values that resonate with customers.

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