Are you running stellar marketing campaigns, getting customers from every direction, and making impressive revenue? But what are you doing to ensure this growth maintains an upward graph?
If you neglect your customers in the continuous race to scale up market share, you’ll lose the battle of sustaining your success.
So what can you do to keep your buyers returning for more and build a business that soars in the long run? A customer-centric culture.
Building a customer-centric culture boosts:
- Satisfaction, trust, and loyalty
- Customer retention
- Better word-of-mouth
Companies prioritizing a customer-centric approach see more profits than those who don’t. From Apple’s stellar customer service to Amazon’s prime delivery, examples of brands nailing the customer-centric approach to make it big are endless.
Want your company among those widely successful names? Don’t let short-term profits sidetrack you. Instead, follow this guide on how to build a customer-centric culture in your company that sustains long-term business growth.
How to Build a Customer-Centric Culture | 9 Steps to Follow
Your customers are the lifeblood of your business. So, keeping your consumers at the forefront of every aspect of your business strategy makes sense.
How? Here are the steps:
1. Hire and train your employees
Your employees define what your business stands for. So, building a customer-centric culture should start within your workforce.
From your first interactions with prospective employees, ensure they share your company’s values of always putting the customer first. Regardless of the role, ask every candidate questions about their customer orientation.
To truly embed customer-centric values, consider skills based learning as a cornerstone of your training programs. This approach not only equips employees with the necessary skills to prioritize customer needs but also fosters a mindset of continuous improvement and empathy.
In short, get the right people on the right seats in your organization’s bus. It makes the next steps easier and sends a clear message about your utmost focus on customers. Define your core values, highlighting customer centricity to guide your employees to keep the consumers in mind in their tasks.
For example, Amazon’s core values highlight their “customer obsession.” It clearly states how the brand strives to become “Earth’s most customer-centric company” through its commitment to operational excellence and long-term thinking.
Empower your frontline employees with empathy. Arrange workshops and interactive exercises on empathy-driven solutions. Make them capable enough to offer the right solution and care immediately without escalating every customer issue to their superiors.
Arrange workshops on empathy-driven solutions and interactive exercises to understand customer emotions better.
Focusing on your team is one of those growth hacking strategy essentials that is often neglected by leaders. Train your marketing and sales team to understand the needs and preferences of every segment inside out. Before rolling out any campaign, ensure it addresses specific customer challenges and highlights how your brand can solve them.
2. Evaluate customer data
How do brands know what their customers want? They analyze customer data acutely. For this, running a few customer surveys and examining them once a year isn’t enough.
Collect first and third-party customer data. Create a repository for it and ensure your employees have adequate access to the user records. At Growth Hackers, we worked with a subscription-based platform where customer insights were previously siloed across teams, and after building a centralized data repository with real-time analytics, they reduced churn by acting faster on behavioral signals.
Get a CRM with a real-time analytics tool so you and your team get instant insights into buyer patterns, pain points, expectations, and preferences. This will give you enough data to learn, evaluate, and improvise a plan of action when dealing with customers.
Companies should regularly discuss real-time customer insights with both newbies and experienced employees. Such collective effort identifies areas of improvement quickly. Your frontline workers can enrich such discussions by offering input from their first-hand customer interactions.
For example, Warby Parker has an integrated data repository and a unique point-of-sale system. Instead of repeating their preferences every time they shop, customers can work one-on-one with associates to find what they need.
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3. Understand customer experience
To become a customer-centric company, you need to see how your customers experience your brand from their perspective. This will pinpoint what you can do to ensure a smooth and memorable customer journey for all your buyers.
First, lay down your brand’s CX strategy. You can use a table like the above screenshot to define each stage. It will help you visualize what each CX phase entails for your customers. At Growth Hackers, we helped a B2B SaaS client map their end-to-end customer journey across all touchpoints and improved activation rates by fixing drop-off points in onboarding and aligning CX strategy with real user behavior.
Create a customer journey map outlining all the interactions and touchpoints at every stage. Analyze data to identify where most customers are dropping out of the journey. List the pain points in those steps and optimize them to suit your customer’s current needs.
4. Collect customer feedback
Who is better to tell you what you need to change to become more customer-centric than your customers themselves?
Collecting user feedback gives you direct insights into what your consumers expect. It also shows you value their opinion, reflecting a more customer-centric brand image.
Run regular surveys every time the customers interact with your key touchpoints. Align the questionnaires with specific actions in each stage and include qualitative and quantitative queries. Add multiple choice, scale questions, and open-ended queries. Use action-based automation to ensure your buyers get the right survey forms at the right time.
Some common surveys you should conduct include:
- NPS and eNPS surveys to measure customer loyalty and identify those at risk of churn
- Customer satisfaction (CSAT) surveys to identify the touchpoints you can improve
- Customer effect score to see how easily your customers can navigate through your product and service
- Exit-intent surveys to understand what made a customer leave your brand
You can also place feedback widgets on interaction touch points such as landing page, sign-up, onboarding, check-out, and emails. For example, Hotjar features a feedback button on its landing page.
Use social listening to see what your customers are saying about your brand. You can also conduct focus groups or run customer forums to collect reviews. Monitor third-party websites for reviews, too.
5. Work on customer feedback
Collecting customer feedback is futile if you don’t apply their insights to improve your operations. So, instead of letting it rot in your system, have dedicated resources go through it routinely.
Identify recurring patterns to see which issues are causing the most bumps in your CX. See what your customers are saying about your product’s quality or delivery. Monitor feedback on customer service and try to understand how you can serve them better with the help of a customer service virtual assistant.
Even if it’s scathing feedback, take it as constructive criticism and analyze the cause of the customer’s frustration. Note these insights and implement them in the next product launch, update, etc.
For example, McDonald’s evaluated feedback and shared a press release stating, “More than 120,000 people tweeted McDonald’s asking for breakfast throughout the day in the past year alone.”
Respecting customer wishes, the fast food chain started serving breakfast options throughout the day.
6. Track key metrics
You must check whether your CX strategies work to cultivate a customer-centric approach. It requires diligent tracking of relevant metrics. Here are some notable ones you should be measuring:
- Churn rate: Measures how many customers you’ve lost in a given period.
- Customer lifetime value (CLV): Measures the net profit you earn from a customer throughout the relationship.
- Net-promoters score (NPS): Measures customer loyalty on a scale of -100 to +100.
Tally the numbers each time you improve the customer journey and see if your efforts are moving the needle. Your strategies need more work if the numbers don’t show the desired growth. At Growth Hackers, we partnered with a fintech platform where decisions were previously based on intuition, and after introducing structured tracking for churn rate, CLV, and NPS, they improved retention rate and significantly improved customer satisfaction scores.
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7. Use technology to connect with customers
Another key element of a customer-centric culture is creating a two-way relationship with your buyers. It shows them you are dedicated to offering them the best experience.
Regular interaction proves they can reach out to you whenever they want, fostering loyalty and strengthening their trust in your brand. So,
- Offer omnichannel customer service.
- Add different chatbots to your website and your Facebook profile.
For example, Samsung offers a customer support chatbot on their website.
You can also run dedicated social media channels to offer customer support.
For example, Apple has a support channel on X/Twitter where it resolves customer issues and connects with users by sharing tips and tricks to navigate its devices.
Before working with Growth Hackers, a manufacturing company relied only on email support with slow response times, but after implementing omnichannel customer support with chatbots, WhatsApp and social channels, they improved response efficiency and significantly strengthened customer loyalty.
8. Tweak your company culture
Every decision your company takes should have the customer in the central focus, whether the step directly affects them. Instill customer-centric values in your employees. Teach your employees to think, “How will it improve or affect the customers?” before proceeding with any task.
Track performance and reward employees who show the utmost dedication to customer experience. This will motivate them to continue to offer the best service your company can offer.
9. Run customer-oriented programs
Make the customer feel valued with your every action. Personalize onboarding according to specific customer demographics and challenges. Once the customer buys your product or subscription, reach out to offer post-purchase support. It proves you take customer service and experience seriously.
Emails are a perfect way to go about providing customer service. For example, thanks to their email support, a gaming company reported a spike in customer retention from 41% to a whopping 56% in 6 months.
Run loyalty programs to incentivize your customers and appreciate their contribution to your business. You can offer loyalty points or implement a tiered rewards program. You can also give cashback or vouchers after your customers make a certain number of purchases. Adding gamification in loyalty programs can further boost engagement and make the experience more enjoyable for customers.
Haircare brand Briogeo offers a simple loyalty program where customers earn three points for every $1 they spend. The more points they save, the bigger the discount they get on their next purchase.
Lastly, curate relevant content for the community. Address the challenges your target market faces and offer actionable solutions.
Have you been listening to your customers?
If not, now is the time to start. With the above strategies, you can build a truly customer-centric business for long-term success.
Here’s a TL;DR version of how to build a customer-centric culture:
- Start the process within your workforce and train employees to put the customer first
- Make customer data accessible across the organization and evaluate them regularly with your teams
- See your customer experience through the buyer’s perspective and eliminate roadblocks at each touchpoint
- Collect and implement customer feedback proactively
- Track and examine key metrics to stay on track
- Conduct customer-oriented programs like post-purchase support, personalized onboarding, relevant content marketing, and loyalty programs.
Being money-driven is essential for any business. However, doing everything you can to make the experience worthwhile for your customers is the key to staying in the game for the long run.
GrowthHackers offers top-notch growth hacking services helping businesses from all over the world grow. There is no fluff with Growth Hackers. We help entrepreneurs and business owners build a customer-centric culture for lasting success, increase their productivity, generate qualified leads, optimize their conversion rate, gather and analyze data analytics, acquire and retain users and increase sales.
We go further than brand awareness and exposure. We make sure that the strategies we implement move the needle so your business grow, strive and succeed. If you too want your business to reach new heights, contact GrowthHackers today so we can discuss about your brand and create a custom growth plan for you. You’re just one click away to skyrocket your business.
