A few passionate managers can change the culture in an organization by leading their team toward customer-centricity. Executive leadership must set the tone and direction for customer-centricity. But middle managers are in the best position to know when to take off the training wheels and make change happen.
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Why are there organizations with customers that are “off the charts” in their loyalty? Customer-centricity creates a symbiotic relationship with customers. Hyper-loyal customers have a passion for converting others to become members of their “club” so that others can have the same great experiences.
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Research which we do for our clients indicates time and time again that customers who reported a problem and were delighted with the outcome have higher satisfaction than the ones who never experienced a problem at all. Why would any company simply want to break-even with these opportunities? Service recovery should energize the organization to become more customer-centered.
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“There’s no such thing as good news or bad news. There’s only fast news and slow news.” Fast knowledge happens within organizations that are connected and proactively communicating with their customers. Every organization should have an early warning system. The best one is built around closeness with your customers.
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The new approach to customer-centricity embodies being a caretaker for the customer ecology in every interaction between external customers and your organization.
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Success requires collaboration so that your organization is “speaking the customer’s language.” Communication is inevitably poor when it is one-sided. Focusing on your customers is the most important dimension of your culture, and its delivery must be as fluent as possible.
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If you are constantly looking at what your competitors are doing, you will simply end up imitating each other. Being customer-centered, on the other hand, brings better clarity to organizations because it focuses them on thinking like a customer, instead of a competitor.
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Amazon.com continues to be a successful, strong brand because it always answers its business questions—strategic and day-to-day—with a solution that includes “the customer.”
Jeff Bezos, Amazon’s CEO, has given the world insight into how he leads the Amazon organization through a series of interviews over the years. I believe the best is “The Institutional Yes” (Harvard
The organizations that will survive and thrive five years from now are the ones that have educated customers. That’s because smart customers will remain loyal to suppliers that deliver high value. This value goes far beyond a generic product or service. It educates its customers as part of the relationship. Customer-centered suppliers understand this as
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Tells are indicators of what others see in you—how you will behave in any situation. Customers use all of your interactions with them to form an impression of how you will treat them as customers in the future. It is really important to understand these tells and to manage them deliberately because customers judge your
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