How do I make my company more customer centric?

When I speak at conferences, the question I get asked most is: how do I get my company to be more customer centred? It’s the topic I covered in our recent webinar ‘Make customer experience your number one priority for 2022’. 

It’s a timely question, not only to kick start the year, but also because cxpartners has been working with Google on a customer centricity study. This work has led to the creation of a Customer Centricity Maturity Model, and seen over 100 high-profile European brands contributing to a benchmarking study. 

A whitepaper on our findings from this study, the launch of the customer-centricity maturity matrix and a maturity self-assessment tool will all be released in March. Sign up here to receive an alert when they are live.

How customer centred are you?

A couple of years back I was working with an organisation that wanted to change its operating model. I asked the senior leadership ‘how customer centred are you?’. They replied ‘Oh, we’re really customer centred - we have great tools for social media listening’.

A lot of organisations assume they are already customer centric. Yet our study with Google has found, most are a long way from operating as a customer-centred organisation. 

As one CEO I recently spoke to said:

Let’s go back - what is a customer-centric organisation?

Being a customer centric organisation is more than having a good customer service department. And it’s more than having a UX team, or a Customer Experience Manager.

It is putting the customer at the heart of every decision that the organisation makes. Everyone needs to ask ‘how does what I do affect the customer?’ and ‘how should I act to make things better?’.

When I’m thinking about that last question ‘how should people act’, there are three practices that I think organisations can draw on and bake into their operating model, culture and practices:

• Agile -  how to make the software that holds the company together
• Lean - improving operations and processes
• User centred design - imagining how to improve  products and services

These three disparate practices work together because they share four key principles:

1. Delivering user value

At their core, the object of all these practices is to deliver user value. Their principles are completely hung on what the user value is, where it is, and how it increases and decreases. This feels like a really valuable thing for any organisation to be focusing on. If the organisation gets value by delivering user value - that is an extremely strong business model. 

2. Evidence based

Another aspect that all of these practices have in common is that they are evidence based. They call out where the organisation is making assumptions: about what people do, what customers need and how customers behave. There is a need for evidence and not jumping into new initiatives without evidence. 

3. Iterative

The third principle that they all have in common is that they are all iterative. They create systems by building on what came before. They move from simple to complex. 

4. Collaborative

The final principle that agile, lean and user centred design have in common is that they are collaborative - people work together simultaneously (rather than in a production line). That’s because different parts of the organisation understand different things, so you need to bring everyone together to solve  problems properly.

Where are you on your customer-centricity journey? 

Getting a sense of maturity of these practices and their principles within your organisation is helpful to look at where you are in your journey, and how to form your roadmap for improvement. 

When Google commissioned us to develop our Customer Centricity Maturity Model, we first wanted to think about what it is that people within an organisation need in order to manage and improve their level of maturity. 

Our customer centricity maturity model breaks down like this: 

• Beginning - The company believes it does not need UX. There is a lack of education.
• Emerging - The company approaches UX erratically. There is a lack of process.
• Defined - There is a customer-centred approach within some teams, planning and budgets. There is a lack of depth. 
• Performing - The company recognises the value of UX but sees it as a functional specialism. There is a lack of UX culture.
• Integrated - Customer-centricity is comprehensive, universal. There is a lack of enterprise metrics.

What you see with a model like this is that what you need to do to move to the next stage changes all the time. For example, if you are just beginning, what you need to do to get to level two (Emerging), is different from what is going to get you up to level three (Defined). 

So, to bounce back to our original question, ‘how do I make my organisation more customer centric?’ - the answer actually depends on where on the maturity scale you are, right now. 

Let’s dive into some of the typical questions I get asked by organisations at the various stages of maturity.

How do I get my boss to listen?

This is a really common question for organisations who are at a lower maturity level. How do you get the decision makers to understand the value of customer-centricity? 

The advice I give is whenever you are attempting to get someone to listen to you, the best place to start is to listen to them. Understanding what they are trying to achieve, their problems and how they see the world, will enable you to then align your practice up with theirs. 

When you’re asking these questions, the response I’d expect you to get back might be any one of these: 

• New / innovative products and services
• Differentiation of product / brand
• Increase sales per customer
• Increased conversion rates
• Increased repeat purchases / customer loyalty
• Lower cost of maintenance
• Lower customer services costs
• Faster time to market
• Lower development costs
• Increased staff satisfaction / lower turnover
• Improved staff recruitment
• Improved resilience

What is interesting, is that customer-centric processes have an impact on all of these things. 

As you can see, there is an awful lot that creating a customer centric organisation can do for your business. 

However, as tempting as it may be to take this list above to the decision-makers - don’t. 

Instead, take the time to listen to them and understand their burning problems. Then you can take the 20% of the list above to them that can help relieve their concerns. This is much more powerful than showing them a list where 80% of the benefits of customer-centricity is what they don’t need. Don’t take the focus away from what really matters to them. 

How do I show that this is strategic?

As we talk to organisations that have moved up the maturity scale, we find businesses who have design or UX practitioners within their team. They are primarily working on optimisation, and we find this - how do I show that this is strategic - is the question we’re asked more and more. Essentially, what is being asked is, how can I show that there is greater value for the organisation here? This is a move from what was just about optimisation, to something far more strategic. 

We worked with one organisation where this was one of the challenges to unpick. We started by training up the development team in UX practices. This enabled them to be able to take on some of the optimisation work, freeing up the UX and Design teams to focus a little deeper on the customer need. 

They were then able to look at creating artefacts such as Experience Maps - which maps out what your organisation is doing, from the customer’s point of view. This is then mapped against business metrics to improve the experience for customers. Mapping in this way enables you to elevate and prioritise the work that you are doing, and therefore aligning it with company strategy. 

How do I get permission to fail?

This is another common question when talking to organisations about customer-centricity. 

For me, gaining permission to ‘fail’ is a dangerous framing. One which is difficult to sell to the CEO. 

But, you aren’t really asking to fail - you’re asking to learn. You are asking for permission to try things out and experiment, and to find the best route forward. This is a far more useful way of explaining to the organisation what needs to happen, and that, at the moment, we are running off assumptions. 

So, instead of getting permission to fail, it’s about getting permission to elevate and learn. 

This leads us to the need to develop processes. One of the most recognisable processes for facilitating learning is ‘Discovery’, ‘Alpha’, ‘Beta’:

• At Discovery you are trying to learn, ‘what is the right problem to solve?’. 
• At Alpha you are trying to learn, ‘what is the most cost-effective solution?’. 
• At Beta you are trying to learn, ‘how should we implement this so that it is bound to work?’. 

A process like this is incredibly powerful at making sure the organisation goes through each stage of learning, and how you can optimise.

How do I get to the higher levels of maturity?

There is a lot written about delivery processes, skills and tools to improve customer centricity. However, when you are getting to the higher levels of maturity, it is really more about the governance that sits around these. 

Often when we are talking to organisations about creating change, it is this level that change is needed on. It’s great to get a team lined up and running a process, but the stakeholders that are around the outside, are involved in governance. 

User-centred governance is critical for organisations that want to be customer centric. To adopt this, we first look at auditing. Establishing what processes, techniques and tools the organisation already has in place. An example might be design patterns. As part of this process we’d also look at the products and services the organisation delivers to its customers. Through this work, we are measuring the gross impact of the value that is being delivered by customer experience. 

The customer-centricity journey isn’t linear (and it never stops!)

When crafting our Customer Centricity Maturity Model, we quickly realised that there wasn’t a linear route to maturity. It isn’t going to work to fix one thing after another. 

We realised that it was a more complex capability model with dimensions. How an organisation is performing within each of the dimensions then provides an overview of how far they are on their journey to maturity. 

We pulled out these critical things: 

• People: The skills, culture and structure of the organisation
• Process: What do people need to go through to deliver stuff
• Governance: How stakeholders behave 
• Facilities: The tools used across the organisation
• Communication: How aware is the entire company of the strategic goals.

This enables you to create a profile of the company, and an indication of where we need to improve to get our overall customer-centricity score up. 

To find out your Customer Centricity score, and how your organisation is performing within each of their dimensions, sign up here for access to our self-assessment tool as soon as it is launched. Not only will you receive your maturity score, but also a bespoke report giving recommendations for improvement.

You can also watch the original webinar from which this blog is taken: ‘Make customer experience your number one priority for 2022’.

Get in touch to discuss your customer centricity journey today.