Key Factors for Successful Customer-Centricity

What has the greatest impact on your ability to improve the customer experience, or better yet, achieve excellence? If I had to pick the top five factors they’d be: 1. Culture Culture eats everything for breakfast — including your CX program — and changes slowly. If you don’t have a customer-focused culture or a plan to try and create one, don’t think a few journey maps are gonna have much impact. 2. Leadership  Whether the CEO and the rest of the senior leadership team really and truly make this a priority is decisive. You can’t make water run uphill, and without their support you’re done. 3. Incentives What behaviours do we incentivize? What customer hostile behaviours do we tolerate? Show me what gets you a bonus or promotion and I’ll tell you the company’s values. Small businesses with skin in the game often create an amazing customer experience because if they don't they'll perish. 4. Psychological proximity Do people really understand the customer? Are they curious about them? Do they spend quality time with them? Do they use the product themselves, just as a customer would? If yes, it will be obvious what to do. If not, it’s HIPPO time — you’ll go with the highest paid person’s opinion. 5. Focus Are we focused on what will create the greatest value for customers, or are we constantly distracted by sideshows, boondoggles, bleeding edge technology, pet projects, and other forms of extraneous bullshit? If you can’t focus you can’t really improve. I’d argue that if these things are working in your favor the rest will (almost take care of itself) but if they’re not there’s little you can do. I’d also argue that in the real world 3,4 and 5 get little to no attention. I’d also, also argue that the things that get the most attention in large organizations are not even remotely close to being in the top five. I’d also, also, also like to hear what your top five would be, what I’ve missed, and where I’m wrong. Over to you. #customerexperience #cx

Business leaders are often their own worst enemies when it comes to improving #CustomerExperience, lifting loyalty and retention, and improving lifetime value. Leaders typically seek to train their employees on how to say more empathetic things to customers without giving employees the time and autonomy to be more empathetic. Leaders regularly say they want employees to take the time to understand customers' needs while rewarding the employees who handle the most customers in the least time. Leaders frequently claim to want a more customer-centric culture while rewarding employees primarily (or exclusively) for short-term financial outcomes. Leaders ask employees to build stronger bonds with customers while at the same time demanding employees do more with less. Leaders say they want to provide effortless experiences to customers while failing to evaluate and alter the corporate policies, practices, and systems that add time, effort, and frustration to customer experiences. Leaders hold employees accountable to improve NPS and satisfaction scores without making the proper investments to address what drives down those scores. There is one and only source of long-term growth for brands: Customers. You can't cost-cut, efficiency-lift, or even out-acquire your way to growth. These are all short-term ways to lift margin and revenue, but they are not sustainable. If you won't listen to customers, understand what they need and want, and find ways to prioritize investments to match, then you cannot retain and grow customers, lift reputation and word of mouth, and increase the lifetime value of customers. Employees can lift #CX in small pockets from the ground up, but sustainable, customer-led growth only comes from top-down customer-centric culture.

Friday honesty: Customer-centricity is a lot harder to maintain than it seems. Even for those of us in Customer Success. The tendency is always to drift toward making our processes and focus company-centric rather than customer-centric. Don't believe me? Just look at one example of this: Customer Journeys. Many teams say that they have a defined Customer Journey. But rather than actually being oriented around the customer, for many the journey map is a list of activities from the company's perspective that are built around milestones the company cares about (contract signature, go-live, renewal, etc). I know about this, because I've been guilty of it in the past myself. I confuse my activity list with a customer journey and wonder why customers aren't as successful as they'd like. While important, that isn't a customer journey. It's an activity list. It's a rut none of us mean to fall into, but it's the natural drift because we live and breathe our own organization. So what do you do about it? How can you adopt a more customer-centric mindset in this area? TRY THIS APPROACH INSTEAD: 1. List out the stages your customers' business goes through at each phase of their experience with your product. Use these to categorize journey stage, rather than your contract lifecycle. 2. For each stage, list out what their experiences, expectations, and activities should be to get the results they want. Don't focus on listing what YOU do, but rather focus on listing what a customer does at each phase of their business with your product. List out the challenges they'd face, the business benefits they'd experience, the change management they'd have to go through, the usage they'd expect. Think bigger than your product here. 3. Then map what support a customer would need to actually accomplish these desired outcomes at each stage of the journey. Think education, change management enablement, training, etc. 4. Based on all of the above, you're finally ready to start identifying what your teams do to support the customer. ____________________________________________ Following a process like this helps build customer-centricity in 3 ways: 1. It causes customers to be the center of how you decide which activities are most important to focus on. 2. It empowers your team to become prescriptive about what customers should be doing for THEIR success. 3. It exposes what you don't know about your customers' business. And if you don't know something, just ask them. Don't make assumptions when you can instead talk to your customers directly. Avoid the company-centric drift, fight to maintain true customer-centricity however you can. This isn't just a nice to have in 2024. It's a business imperative that's important for any business to survive in this climate. But I want to hear from you! How do you guard your org from drifting to company-centricity? #SaaS #CustomerSuccess #Leadership #CustomerCentric

4 Steps to Improving Customer-Centricity The most successful companies understand that their best customers are their most valuable asset. And their acquisition, development and retention efforts are based on seeing customers as INDIVIDUALS. Here's a simple way to become more customer-centric: 1. Understand the customer's context Deeply understand your customer's environment, their challenges, opportunities, goals, and even constraints. Focus on the psychographics, not just the demographics. 2. Understand the customer's needs Identify the customer's current and future needs, wants, and expectations. You can do this through direct communication with the customer, market research, or customer feedback. 3. Tailor your offering Once you understand your customer's operating reality, you can adapt your product or service to better suit their needs. This can involve customization of your product, flexible pricing models, or specific support and service offerings. 4. Be proactive with communication Meeting a customer in their operating reality also involves being proactive in communication, addressing potential issues before they become problems, and being responsive to customer questions and concerns. Leverage backend automation so you can spend more time engaging in "forward-facing" activities with current or prospective customers. ******************** Simple, but not easy. The business success you're looking for is in the work you might be avoiding. If you want an edge over your competition, carve out some time and follow the 4 steps above.