Customer centricity

Many organizations claim to be customer centric, many of those include customer centricity in their values, but not all of these businesses truly make their key decisions with a customer-first mentality. So what? Why does it matter that some do and some don’t? In short, it doesn’t. We are not looking to define what your business strategy should be – the important consideration here is that you are honest about what your values are, as that means you can truly work towards achieving your goals.
Being customer centric, in its purest form, means making your decisions around what is best for your customers. This might mean making some financial sacrifices, reducing profits or creating work that does not directly benefit the organization. If your business claims to be customer centric then a good question to ask yourself is whether you really are putting the customer decisions ahead of the financial decisions. This is not to say that putting your financial decisions ahead of your customer decisions is a bad thing. There are circumstances where this is entirely appropriate. For example, your shareholders may demand a profit or sales target that you are not likely to achieve without increasing your prices, or you may not be able to afford the improvements that the customer demands without compromising the financial performance of the business.
According to research by Deloitte Consulting and Deloitte & Touche, customer-centric organizations are 60 per cent more profitable than those that are not and they have lower operating costs (Deloitte, 2014). This may motivate your business to take this strategy seriously but the most important thing is to ensure that your organization is open and honest about its true motivations, as this will dictate your strategy. Building a strategy that is customer centric in order to fit with the business values will create serious problems if these values are not truly lived. For example, a customer-centric strategy may involve setting up a dedicated social service team to ensure a fast turnaround to customer messages. It may involve purchasing CRM software to enable deep personalization and could also include spending money on paid search to ensure customers find the relevant pages, even if they have no commercial goals. If, however, the organization is not actually customer centric then these initiatives may well come under scrutiny for not generating financial value, but it would be too late to remove the people who had been recruited and so your strategy may gain a poor reputation amongst your stakeholders. It is worth ensuring that your strategy is truly aligned with your genuine level of customer centricity.

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