Customer centricity is a strategic commitment to focus every resource of the company on serving and delighting profitable customers of the organisation. Customer service is not a technique but a mindset that inspires an organisation to keep delivering superior service to its target audience. Marketing is serious business and serious business is all about marketing.

Successful companies get it. They report to the customer.

What distinguishes customer centric organisations from other companies is that they have moved beyond lip service and reoriented their entire operating model around the customer, increasing customer satisfaction and their own profitability in the process. Customer centric companies understand not only what the customer values, but also the value customer represents to their bottom line.

They align their operating models behind a carefully defined and quantified customer segmentation strategy and tailor business streams – product development, demand generation, product and scheduling, supply chain, customer care  etc, to delivering the greatest value to the best customers for the least cost.

As businesses focus on sustainable and profitable top line growth, they are recognizing that the path to success requires being customer centric and this revelation is reshaping the modern business and driving the way that organisations interact with customers.

Delivering better customer experience has become a key priority in the modern business. There are direct links between customer experience and loyalty, advocacy and revenues. Consequently it is vital for any business to be able to measure the quality of the customer experience they provide, accurately and reliably

Any business that is committed to creating a customer centric business has to focus on certain building blocks that will enable it to deliver quality service to its chosen markets and ensure that they retain these customers who are the blood within the veins of any business.

Customer centricity is a business strategy and culture that is designed around customer satisfaction at all levels of the organisation. A customer centric organisation infuses principles of positive customer experience in leadership, management, product or service development, marketing, after sales service and every other facet of the business operations.

In many ways, a customer centric business strategy goes far beyond offering good customer service. Successful customer centric businesses build their entire brands around their customers who are the lifeblood of their successful business models. It is therefore important for our businesses as they compete globally to ensure that they are customer centric. The focus has to be on the customer and everything else is background music.

Disruptive start-ups, home based businesses and other high octane outfits often forget to define their customers when starting out. With exciting or innovative products or services, it is easy to forget about the customers when designing the business roadmap. It is very important to have a clear definition of who you customers are and infuse that definition into your company’s core values. These values should describe how customers should be handled and define the relationship between the customers, vendors and employees.

Once you have defined and ensure everyone understands your customer centric values and definitions, you will need to reinforce these values on a regular basis. Subtle methods like devoting a few minutes every morning or at least weekly to stress on one or more customer centric values will go a long way in ensuring the culture becomes habitual. This means that you cannot afford to pay lip service to customer centric issues.

One might ask – what makes an organisation customer centric? The key is striking the right balance between customer pleasure and company profit. To achieve this balance below are some of the critical pillars one might want to focus on.

 Pillar 1: Understanding customer life cycle

While most businesses today tout rich, on-going customer relationships, most are organised and equipped to treat clients as a set of discrete, unrelated transactions over time – a series of events. They have a microscopic view of what motivated the customer to buy their product and service in the first place and even less information about the customer’s needs and aspirations going forward. This is a very primitive way of doing business. To guess what else a customer might what and increase penetration, they default to more product push in the form of cross selling, a technique that despite all the hype has proved largely ineffective.

On the contrary, truly customer centric companies take a different wide-angle view. They develop a holistic and continuous view of each customer’s evolving life cycle needs as they move through marriage, home ownership, parenthood and other transforming life experiences.

This is one of the effective ways of retaining a customer. Some banks for example used to go to the University of Zimbabwe, open student accounts and would nourish that client, grow with them as they move towards different cycles of their lives, from being a student, to an executive, from being single to getting married and even offering their children bank accounts and the process would go on and on.

Pillar 2: Solution Mindset.

Becoming a customer centric organisation also presupposes a fundamental shift in mindset from selling products to solving problems. This is a shift that some of our businesses still have to come to appreciate in their businesses. Businesses should stop selling products that they are producing and start producing products they can sell. There is a huge difference between the two approaches. The company’s choice from these two approached can determine the success or failure of a business. The latter approach takes into account provision of solutions to the customer’s needs while the former is about forcing the product down the throat of the customer like its baby feeding.

Solutions replace products as the basic element of customer value proposition. In line with this concept some businesses have now migrated from selling “off the shelf” products to customizing solutions. The main objective is to design a suite of modular product bundles that, when coupled with an advisory relationship, can deliver cost effective tailored solutions to clients’ specific problems. The challenge is on how to make money doing it. It is important for the businesses to ensure that they are fully knowledgeable about customer’s needs through research so they can provide relevant solutions and never to second guess the needs of the customers.

Pillar 3: Never stop interacting with your clients.

In order to develop customer intuition, and offer relevant advice, customer centric companies engage in a continuous dialogue with customers that starts long before a product or service is purchased and continues long after the sale. Again the trick is to do this cost effectively. Most industries, particularly the financial services, have historically restricted this sort of tailored, advisory relationship to high net-worth individuals. However some leading financial institutions globally are now increasing their penetration of the mass market banking segment by developing innovative advice bundling and technology enabled tools.

Pillar 4: Empower your front line staff.

Customer insights and intelligence invariably dwell where the customers are – on the front line. Distribution channels should be armed with skills and authority to tailor solutions at the point of contact. Sadly though, too frequently customer management, pricing marketing and innovation are dictated from top down and sales teams are relegated to order takers. Front line staff should be given the latitude to address and anticipate customer needs. The front line staff are the face of your business so they should be empowered to make decisions.

Pillar 5: Cross functional effort.

A customer – centric organisation demands a new culture of collaboration. The product oriented sales culture of old is dead and buried because it was by definition, territorial with little sharing across organisational silos. This is no longer applicable in a customer centric organisation. Tailoring solutions to customers ever changing needs requires a level of cooperation across product and service lines and across company boundaries that is unprecedented and not a little uncomfortable. It is important for companies to build linkages across organisations. Marketing is far too important to be left to the marketing guys alone. Employees at every level in every division will also need to deeply understand customer needs to make the end to end client experience streamlined and satisfying. Stimulating the right attitude and creating cross functional teams will require a full scale change management program, one that motivates participants at a basic human level to invest in a customer centric future.

Concluding remarks

There is need to take customer centricity very seriously and not to treat it as window dressing which just produces merely platitudes and hollow gestures. We believe failing to execute the transformation associated with customer centricity will relegate many organisations to the sidelines of its respective industry and many will fail. Success will hinge on progressing past platitudes to the real substantial work of building a truly customer centric organisation.