Are You Really Customer-Centric? Or Is That Just Something You Say?

As a business owner, it can be challenging to determine whether your company is truly customer-centric. While it may be easy to say that your company prioritizes its customers, actually achieving this goal can be more complex. Fortunately, there are several external signals that can help you determine if your company is truly customer-centric. In this post, we will explore some of the key sources of information that you can use to evaluate your company's customer-centricity.

Here are some sources of information that can help you determine whether your company is truly customer-centric:

Product and service reviews

Pay attention to what your customers are saying about your products or services. Review aggregators like G2 and Capterra can be useful for software companies, while ecommerce stores often have product reviews. Look for mentions of customer service and how well your company is meeting customer needs.

Employee reviews

What are your employees saying about your company's treatment of customers? Employee review sites like Glassdoor and Indeed can provide valuable insight into how your company treats its employees, which can be a proxy for how it treats its customers.

Social media

Monitor your company's interactions with customers on social media. This can provide insight into how well you handle complaints and questions, as well as what attitudes you display publicly.

Published policies

What do your company's published policies say about how you handle complaints and refunds? Are you making it easy for customers to do business with you, or are you putting up unnecessary barriers?

Customer service accessibility

Is your customer service team accessible and responsive? Are you making an effort to reduce customer effort, rather than trying to shift the burden of solving problems onto customers?

Knowledge base documents

Are your self-help resources well-written and accessible? Are you providing valuable information to help customers solve their problems?

Conversations with employees

Talk to your current and former employees to get a better understanding of your company's level of customer-centricity. Employees who work in customer-facing roles can provide valuable insight into how well your company is meeting customer needs.

By evaluating these sources of information, you can get a better sense of how well your company is meeting customer needs and expectations. If you find that your company is falling short in any of these areas, it may be time to take action and re-evaluate your customer-centricity. Ultimately, choosing to do business with customer-centric companies is better for everyone involved, from customers to employees to business owners.

Tips for Building a Customer-Centric Business

Businesses can take various steps to prioritize the customer experience and improve customer-centric strategies. One approach is to operationalize customer empathy by implementing methods such as reading customer messages, creating mini personas, and training customer support specialists to express empathy. These methods can help to ensure that customer needs and concerns are being heard and addressed.

Another way to improve the customer experience is to hire for customer orientation. Businesses can prioritize customer needs in the hiring process and assess candidates' customer orientation during interviews. This can help to ensure that all employees are working towards a common goal and that the customer experience is a top priority.

To measure and track the effectiveness of customer-centric strategies, businesses should regularly measure and track customer-centric metrics. These can include customer satisfaction, net promoter score, and customer effort score. By using these metrics, businesses can identify areas for improvement and make data-driven decisions to improve the customer experience.

Overall, a customer-centric approach involves prioritizing the customer experience at every level of the business. From hiring for customer orientation to regularly soliciting feedback and data, businesses can ensure that customer needs are being heard and addressed. By using data and feedback to inform decision-making and continuously improving and iterating on strategies, businesses can remain relevant and effective in their efforts to provide a seamless and satisfying customer experience.

About Smoothen

At Smoothen, we specialize in helping companies implement these strategies and take their customer experience to the next level. Our team of experts can assist with everything from customer research and journey mapping to employee training and culture building. Contact us today to learn more about how we can help your company become truly customer-centric and drive business growth.