Importance Of Building A Customer-Centric Culture At Your Organization

According to a report, only 14% of marketers believe that customer-centricity is the competitive edge they hold in the marketplace. This goes down to 11% when it comes to effectively communicating this competitive advantage to the customers.

In other words, companies are struggling to build a culture focused on customers. While it can be because of the absence of systems and processes or the lack of resources to segment customers, most companies fail to build a customer-centric culture in the organizations.

Many companies claim to be customer-centric organizations in theory. However, the reality is that the culture of these companies is either product-driven or sales-driven, and there are a few departments like marketing that are customer-centric.

It is important to have a culture that keeps customers in focus across departments for the long-term success of the business.

A customer-centric culture is the best competitive edge to have, and if you can share the customer-centric values that you follow with your customer base, you have a decisive winner in your hand. Building a culture that is customer-facing, needs much more than pasting ‘Customer is King’ on your marketing collateral and other touchpoints.

Here is why building a customer-centric culture is important for the success of your organization.

What is a customer-centric culture?

A customer-centric culture is a set of beliefs, strategies, and values that are made, keeping the customer as a central point for the organization’s success. It focuses on creating intense positive experiences for the customer. 

The customer-driven culture in the organization focuses on pre-sales, sales, and after-sales experience for the customer to increase profit and attain a competitive edge in the marketplace.

Importance of building a customer-centric culture

It is critical to building a customer-centric culture in any organization for its long-term success. According to a Deloitte study, customer-centric organizations are 60% more profitable than other companies.

Building a culture that is customer-centric is much more than just providing everything a customer wants – it is all about creating trust and inspiring confidence. Here’s why building a customer-driven culture is important for companies:

1. Increased customer lifetime value (CLV)

Building a customer-centric culture helps you increase the lifetime value of the customer. The lifetime value of the customer is the period in which the consumer would continue to buy from you

As customers like to engage with brands that listen to them, understand them, and provide helpful solutions, building a culture with a customer-centric focus helps you create more value for customers. This, in turn, helps companies to build a ladder of a long engagement with the customer.

2. Creation of brand ambassadors

By building a customer-centric culture in the organization, you create many brand ambassadors. With a culture built on a customer-driven strategy, the larger your customer base, the more prominent will be the army of your brand ambassadors. The loyal customers will share the company’s values with their peers and their social circle. 

You can use a knowledge management system to consistently share the values that you want to be known for among your customers. Be it the website, social media, support channels, or any other medium that the customers contact you; the values should be portrayed consistently across these platforms. 

3. Loyalty

Delivering a positive customer experience consistently is one of the most critical pieces in the business strategy to create customer loyalty. It establishes a strong customer base that continues to buy from your business. 

You need to focus on the entire customer journey rather than a few touchpoints. You can only do this by focusing on the relationship rather than the transaction.

4. Effective marketing

Building a customer-driven culture helps you reduce marketing costs. As you listen to more feedback from the customers, you can make improvements in the system that helps you attain operational efficiencies. 

This helps in reducing overall marketing costs by reducing the cost of acquiring customers and building a brand that stands for customer success. A knowledge management platform can help you create a holistic ecosystem for customer communication across touchpoints. 

5. Increased revenue

As you try to focus on customer problems and come up with meaningful solutions, you will be able to create a consistent stream of revenue for your business

As more loyal consumers would continue to buy from your business for a longer period of time due to a positive customer experience, you can expect that sales would continue to rise as long as you stay focused on providing a customer-centric experience

How to create a customer-centric culture?

Creating a customer-centric culture needs you to take some proactive steps. These are the actions that can help you create a culture centered around customers in your organization:

1. Focus on empathy

One of the best things that you can do to create a culture of customer-centricity is by including empathy in your strategy and communication. It is the ability to identify the customer’s needs and understand and respond to them with a solution.

2. Build a Knowledge management practice

One of the ways that you can build a customer-centric culture is by efficient use of knowledge management to inculcate knowledge-sharing practices. Building a seamless communication channel and strategy with knowledge management is a great way to start. 

Various functions of knowledge management like filtering existing knowledge and creating new knowledge would help eliminate internal confusion and aid in creating customer-centric experiences

3. Share customer insights

Customer insights shall not be limited to sales and marketing functions only. You should share customer insights across departments, as it will help your employees understand how their efforts contribute to customer satisfaction. 

You can use a knowledge management platform to share customer insights with your employees proactively. This will help you structure the insights interactively to help in easier understanding.

4. Directly interact with customers

The direct interaction with customers should not be limited to the customer support teams. Instead, you should create opportunities for direct interaction with customers for a variety of departments. This will help in attaining a better understanding of customer requirements.

5. Link compensation to customer satisfaction

As you tie elements of the employees’ compensation package to customer satisfaction scores, you would be encouraging a customer-driven culture in the organization.

Conclusion

Creating a culture of customer-centric values needs a focused strategy and, most importantly, a realization that it is critical for the organization’s success.

As you take steps towards building a customer-centric culture, a knowledge management platform like Knowmax can help you build a strong knowledge base for sharing customer insights across the organization.