In the world we live in today, customers have unprecedented power over the survival of a business. Customers, of course, have always been essential for a business doing well. However, with increased competition in all sectors, you need to do more to keep your customers happy.
Nowadays, customer centricity goes hand in hand with customer satisfaction. The modern customer centric business is so in tune with the customer needs that it anticipates them before the customers themselves realize that these are important to them.
Adopting a customer centric mindset means putting the customer at the center of it all. Your decisions on services, delivery, products, and experiences should be directed at promoting loyalty and advocacy among customers.
So, what is the impact of customer centricity exactly and how can you use it to your business’ benefit? This is what we are going to explore with this article. We will define customer centricity, what this type of approach involves, the benefits that come with adopting this type of company culture, and how Collabo Creative can help you in your pursuit of becoming a customer centric organization.
What Is Customer Centricity?
The concept of customer centricity has been around as a buzz word for a number of years now. Most businesses do get it in theory. The problems start to appear when the theory is put into practice.
So, what does customer centricity actually mean? It means that you, as a business, have decided to take the necessary steps to understand your customers wholeheartedly.
And not just understand, but actually act on the found knowledge by creating a company culture that empowers employees to make the best decisions for both customers and the company at the same time.
It is important to clarify that becoming a customer centric enterprise is as much about strategy as it is about culture. It involves making a monumental effort to shift the way your business operates. This is why most businesses give up in their pursuit of becoming more customer centric.
However, considering that 51% of customers decide to never do business with a company after just a single negative customer experience and that out of this 51% an astonishing 95% go on to tell others about their experience, it is clear to see that being customer centric is crucial to the customer lifetime value.
What Is the Impact of Customer Centricity?
If we are to look at market research, statistically the impact of customer centricity is clear — 64% of people put more value on customer experience than on the price of a service or product. This suggests that simply undercutting your competition on price does little in terms of acquiring or retaining customers.
In fact, companies with just an above-average customer experience have been found to outperform their competitors in terms of revenue.
Statistics aside, let’s have a look at some direct positive impacts customer centricity can have on your business.
Be One Step Ahead
Customers’ wants and needs can change swiftly. Adapting quickly to customers’ pain points can make the difference between a struggling business and a prosperous one.
This ever-changing nature of customers can make it difficult for businesses to stay ahead of the game.
However, being customer centric will allow you, as a company, to quickly change your services or products as you will always be in tune with what your customers want.
Customer Satisfaction and Loyalty Guaranteed
It stands to reason that if you offer exactly what customers expect from your business, then customer satisfaction is guaranteed.
Your customers are satisfied? Then, this surely means that your customer loyalty will be off the chart as well.
As we like to say, customer satisfaction and loyalty go hand in hand.
Strong Brand Reputation
We have covered this earlier in this article. Customers have a voice and they like to express their opinions on the services or products they use. Being a customer centric business allows you to be in touch with what your customers have to say.
It doesn’t matter if what it’s being said is good or bad. Being in a position to always listen to what your customers are saying means you will have the upper hand in turning a bad impression into a positive one.
Acting in such a way will make your customers feel valued and appreciated. The result of all this hard customer centric work? Your customers will not only recommend you to others but also turn into repeat customers.
Becoming a Customer Centric Organization - The Collabo Creative Way
By now we hope that you are genuinely onboard the customer centricity train. If so, we are ready to show you how we can make this journey as hassle-free as possible. We have a three-way customer centric approach that is based on:
Design thinking
Experience mapping
Design sprints
Let’s have a look at each of them in detail and how these will help you in becoming more customer centric.
Design Thinking
This process is all about problem-solving. It is intended to help you innovate your portfolio of products, services, systems, and indeed experiences for the better. The thinking behind it is to help you frame the right problem to address so that you avoid treating the symptom rather than the root cause.
When it comes to our approach to design thinking, we have taken it a step further. What we have done is found ways to leverage the concept behind design thinking and came up with practices that you can employ internally so that your teams operate more effectively and efficiently.
Experience Mapping
The process of an experience map is all about helping you visualize a customer’s needs and processes as they go about achieving their goals and satisfying their needs.
Basically, we will guide you through what your customers experience when they use your company’s services. We will help you see through your customers’ eyes. Using experience mapping is a fantastic way to empathize with your customers and make an invisible experience concrete and tangible.
As a method to become more customer centric, experience mapping is great because it allows you to:
See what needs to be improved in your processes
Keep your teams and departments on the same page when it comes to understanding what your customers are going through
Understand what a customer’s life looks like, what is most important to them, and why do their needs exist in the first place
Design Sprints
If time is of the essence, then perhaps a design sprint is the right fit for you. These are specifically tailored to your needs and the problems you want to solve on your way to becoming more customer centric.
These sessions are run by a design facilitator and are aimed at empowering your team to achieve a specific objective in a predetermined time frame. The design sprints are 100% based on the design thinking approach we already talked about.
We recommend a design sprint if you:
Are looking to hit the ground running on an improvement project
Want to take the rough draft of a problem and quickly work your way through to a roughed out prototype of a solution
Are interested in designing a strategic plan for the whole business or a particular department
Ready to Become More Customer Centric?
We could talk about customer centricity all day long. At the end of the day, it is down to you to make the first step towards transforming your business. A transformation that will help you edge out your competition and equip you with the right tools to predict your customers’ needs.
We have tried to show you both the statistics and the theory behind the concept as well as our approach to helping you instill a customer centric culture in your business.
If you have finished reading this article and are left wanting more, why not register for one of our FREE online courses on intro to design thinking?