Building a customer-centric support culture is vital for long-term business success. This means creating an experience for your customers that feels personalized and valued, keeping their needs and perspectives top of mind, and prioritizing them over competitors’ products or services.
Collaboration across departments to share knowledge and gain insights is also vital. Your sales and marketing teams may identify customer preferences that your support team doesn’t know about, for instance.
Listening is Key
Companies need to make sure they’re listening carefully to what their customers want from their products and services, so every team member from leadership down through frontline employees needs to remain aware of what their customers are telling them.
One of the best ways to demonstrate that you value their opinions and feedback is by listening and acting upon it – whether that means personalizing service, closing loops with them and thanking them for doing business with you.
Discover Card is one company that actively listens to their customers by offering multiple channels through which they can communicate. This helps customers resolve any issues they encounter quickly while creating an exceptional customer experience that keeps them coming back for more. Research shows that companies who prioritize customer-centricity grow 2.5 times faster than their competition.
Empathy Is the Key
Customer-centric teams require teams that sincerely understand customer needs. It is integral for healthy relationships. Empathy allows one to put oneself into someone else’s shoes and understand their feelings, thoughts, and perspectives – for instance if your friend is complaining that a game they are playing is unfair and you try to understand their point of view, that would be considered empathy.
To cultivate an environment of empathy in their company, businesses should incorporate customer centricity training into employee curriculum and regularly discuss real-time customer feedback with employees from all departments. Furthermore, it may be worthwhile tying elements of compensation directly to customer satisfaction scores.
Assigning customer-centricity a core value sends the message that customer-focus is essential to your organization and will be consistently rewarded. This makes it easier for employees to make decisions that support the mission, and provides them with guidance when encountering coworkers who do not live up to these values.
Take the Time to Ask Questions
Questions that arise from genuine curiosity are the best ones to ask. Employees who strive to understand what customers desire can use this curiosity to craft the most engaging customer experiences possible.
Employees should also be sensitive to both verbal and nonverbal cues from customers that send signals about what is expected from them, which will enable them to show empathy while remaining attentive towards what their customers have to say.
As this will allow employees to ask the right questions and make better decisions that meet customer needs, companies must provide training for their employees as well as ongoing feedback. With more people leaving their jobs due to poor working conditions, companies must strive to ensure employees are happy and empowered – this will ultimately create a customer-focused culture both internally and externally.
Empower Your Employees
Customer centricity should be at the core of every employee experience – from onboarding, promotion and development through succession planning. In order to do so, all team members must understand and believe in your company values.
To achieve this goal, it’s necessary to integrate customer centricity into your hiring process and develop comprehensive training programs covering vital skills such as empathy and active listening. Furthermore, employees should have easy access to customer data that allows them to prioritize individual persona needs and deliver tailored solutions that drive success.
To motivate your teams to prioritize the needs of each persona, consider giving them more freedom when making decisions that benefit customers – for instance Ritz Carlton gives its frontline employees $2,000 per incident so that they may solve customer issues without needing approval from a supervisor.