Written by Doron Pryluk, VP of customer experience at GlassesUSA.com.
Every company wants to create a loyal customer base, but there is no bulletproof way to do it. A loyal customer base generally starts with an exceptional customer experience throughout the entire customer journey. One of the key components of an exceptional customer experience is by cultivating a customer-centric culture.
Here are my 10 tips on how to create a customer-centric culture in your organization:
1) Listening is worth more than hearing
Being an effective listener helps you build trust with your customers, which encourages them to spend more time interacting with your business, referring their friends and family and enabling better upsell opportunities.
Listening requires openly accepting both positive and negative feedback and learning how to read between the lines, deciphering the Voice of Customer (VoC) using data analysis and qualitative learning through individual customer interviews.
2) Customer experience and product work must go hand in hand
It is not enough to provide exceptional customer experience once you acquire the customer. It sounds intuitive, but many companies do not consider the broader CX in early stages of product development.
If your company is not designing products with customer experience in mind, you could be missing out on opportunities. Additionally, if your product teams do not have a constant feedback loop with the customer-facing teams, you are missing out on valuable customer insights.
3) Understand your customers
It is important to know who your customers are and what they care about. It is not enough to know that your customers use your product. Who are they? What is important to them? What are their dislikes? What is their preferred method of communication? Do trends matter to them?
By defining the core personas that your company serves, you can build your ideal customer profiles. This will help to make sure that you market, sell, develop and service your customers in the most effective and valuable way possible.
4) Use data to optimize every step of the experience
New technology and tools make it easy for businesses to easily get access to large amounts of data, and that means companies can track users from initial contact through every stage of their relationship with their brand. Every part of an experience, be it web design, customer service, or sales, can be optimized by analyzing metrics and making changes in real time.
By observing what works and what does not as customers interact with your brand, you can streamline each step of the journey into something more streamlined and effective.
5) Provide ongoing support
To keep customers coming back for more, you have to think beyond your product or service and provide stellar customer support. This means setting up an integrated system that reaches out to customers through channels such as phone calls, emails and live chat.
The team in charge of handling queries will need training on how best to address issues and more importantly, they must understand your company’s mission. Ideally, they will get feedback from each customer they speak with so they can learn which products are popular and what problems come up frequently in order to constantly be improving.
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customer culture
6) Consider every channel your customer could use when designing your product, service and communication
Often, businesses will focus on their favorite channel when designing products and services. A customer-centric approach ensures that your business takes into account how your customers may interact with your products or services across all relevant channels, and also how they might like to interact with your business that they might not be doing today. This includes websites, apps, emails, newsletters, social media posts, and more. That way, you can make sure you are giving your customers what they both want and need and not just focusing on what is easiest for your business.
7) Focus on the problem you are trying to solve
Simply put, every business exists to solve a problem for someone. The job of a marketer is to target customers who have pain points and reach them before your competitors do. However, this does not stop at marketing as the next steps are just as important. Companies must consider how they can minimize customer pain points at every stage of the customer journey.
8) Make employee value and impact known and celebrated
Every employee should know how their contributions fit into your company’s big picture. Every person that has the opportunity to impact the CX needs to know how they can contribute positively and actively toward creating better experiences for your customers.
Only after they understand why they are important in creating seamless customer journeys can their work on behalf of customers be meaningful, passionate and impactful.
9) Communicate directly with your customers
Companies must find ways to enable employees to interact directly with customers, even those in more back-office functions. Every employee has some impact on the customer experience, even if it is indirect, so each one can benefit can benefit from learning directly from customer interactions.
Most company's business models do not allow for direct employee-customer contact, but leaders can facilitate interactions by having employees observe focus groups, sales and support calls, customer visits, attend broad scale meetings or industry conferences.
10) Get creative with problem solving. If nothing else works, try doing something new
Some of life’s most difficult problems require lateral thinking, and that can be a good thing. Creative problem solving allows us to see things in new ways and avoid mentally rutted roads. Everyone has heard about creative brainstorming sessions, but it is far more useful to think of creative problem solving as an everyday activity. When we stop seeing our work from one perspective alone and instead look at it from different angles, possibilities often open up.
While customer experience (CX) might not be at the top of everyone’s agenda, it should be. Culture and strategy go hand in hand and it is only when customer-centric methodologies are supported by the culture will a company realize its customer-centric potential.
A great CX strategy can differentiate your business in a very crowded and cluttered marketplace. A focus on delivering consistent, excellent experiences builds customer trust, increases customer retention and drives referrals. And when your customers are loyal and happy, you benefit from better reputation management as well.