How to be customer centric?

A successful business owner should have a practical and logical mind, and that’s the key to a healthy balance sheet. You must be decisive, quick on your feet, think 3-5 steps ahead, and judge the situations quickly with your company and employees in mind. This doesn’t necessarily translate into being customer centric.

Whilst thinking about your customer, you need to take your business hat off completely. It takes quite a mental shift to immerse yourself in the customer’s life and completely let go of any pre conceived ideas of what your product and service should or shouldn’t be. You need to learn how to feel for, not think for, or on behalf of the customer – this is a lot harder than it sounds.

The role of CX has been identified as a separate position within some larger and highly transactional organisations (banks, retailers, automotive etc). Your CX strategy requires an independent view, still within the business, but one that is free of sales, market share, profit and even from the marketing agenda.

A CX professional plays the role of customer advocate and, if invited into the Boardroom, displays ultimate empathy with the customer, regardless of what the rest of the table thinks. This is the ultimate value of a CX Manager within a company.

Whilst undertaking a CX course at University, I had an eye opening moment with my own subconscious way of thinking. A couple of times, my mentor pointed out that I think too much about the business side of things. This was amazingly novel feedback and sounded really odd to me at first…. I thought to myself…” All of my previous employers would have praised me for being such a company and business conscious employee!”

Of course, being a part of marketing and strategy in larger commercial organisations, I have been conditioned to focus on budgets, sales targets and market share all the time. Customer related lines were largely just posters on the wall. But to be truly customer centric, one needs to completely let go of any commercial conditioning and let the empathy guide the creative mind.

Since turning my full attention to the world of CX, I was invited for an interview for the role of Head of CX in a sizable industrial organisation. I couldn’t pass a line in the Job Description which showed “Increase in Sales” as a KPI, and I had to point it out to the recruiter. Naturally, an excellent customer experience will result in high retention rates and attract new customers, however, putting direct monetary (and not specific customer) metrics on your CX advocates will not allow them to fully deliver innovative customer centric solutions.

You don’t necessarily need to have a full time CX staff member. The process of continuous evaluation of customer needs is cyclical and can be deployed at any time with some regular intervals by a consultant, and someone who is truly capable of keeping a clear and independent view of your business, what you’re offering and what limitations you may have.

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