It’s great knowing that you’re trying to become a customer-centric company. Because today, a company that focuses strongly on exhibiting a customer-centric culture is the one that’s known to make huge profits, build a loyal customer base and thrive in the long run!
Only if you shift towards becoming a customer-centric organization, there’s going to be growth and stability in the years to come. And a lot of businesses have already become or have started to become more customer-centric.
Anyways, in this read, we’ll be looking at the ways that’ll help your company become a customer-centric company. In fact, the below-mentioned habits are the ones that top customer-centric organizations follow. And the ones you should start implementing in your business.
But like always, before we get there, let’s quickly cover some basics.
What Do You Mean By a Customer-Centric Culture?
In a sentence, being customer-centric means putting your customers above all – your customers’ requirements, their needs and requests come first, no matter what!
A customer service oriented company will resolve customer queries immediately and take action by keeping their customers in mind. Offering great customer service and great customer experiences will be their top priority.
Here are a few customer service oriented statistics for you,
- Customer-centric companies are found to be 60% more profitable when compared to companies that do not focus on customers.
- A massive 73% of consumers say that good experiences are the key to brand loyalties.
- Companies with great customer experience bring in an approximate 5.7 times more revenue than companies that fall behind in customer experiences.
- A huge 75% of CX management executives gave a top score to customer experience stating it to be super important for businesses.
- Loyal brand customers are known to purchase again five times more likely from the same brand.
Those are some of the statistics that tell you why you need to be a customer-centric company and take a customer-centric approach today. You can take a look at more statistics in this Forbes article.
Now that you know the what and the why let’s take a look at how!
How to Become a Customer-Centric Company?
1. Customer-First Service Culture Within the Company
The first step to becoming a customer-centric company is to instill a set of values within your organization. Because when your employees and support agents do not understand how important being a customer-centric company is, your company is never going to reach there!
Make sure you explain to your support team that your customers are above all and that their satisfaction is important for the company’s growth no matter what. Explain the values of having a customer-first service culture within the organization and what benefits it could bring.
The idea is to make decisions by keeping in mind what’s best for the customers. Not what’s best for the company. Because a customer-centric company understands that happy customers benefit their business to a great extent.
Speaking of being customer-centric, we wanted to tell you this. Zappos is one of the businesses that’s truly customer-centric for a long time now. And we totally love their customer service. You can know why Zappos is awesome when it comes to customer service here!
2. Start Providing Support On Channels Your Customers Prefer
Being a customer-centric organization means being available to your customers on channels they prefer.
Not every customer wants to get in touch with your business via the support channel you’ve deployed. For some, it might be via live chat. And for some, it might be email or any other social media channel.
The best approach would be to start using an omnichannel customer support platform. An omnichannel support platform like Simplify360 allows you to manage all your customer interactions & queries from one single inbox without having to switch between channels.
This allows your agents to offer support to customers on channels they prefer – increased first response times and CSAT scores.
Instead of asking your customers what channels they prefer, it’s better to be on them already!
3. Follow the Proactive Approach
Another good trait a customer-centric company never fails to look at is the proactive approach.
Being proactive here means anticipating a problem your customers could possibly face and coming up with a solution instead of waiting for the problem to arise and then solving it. Being proactive can save your customer from going through all the support processes and deliver them great customer experiences.
Offering resources like FAQs and helpful articles can help customers in case they find any difficulties. Other ways to identify customer problems and know how satisfied they are would be by sending Net Promoter Scores and Customer Satisfaction surveys.
Speaking of customer satisfaction surveys, here are 25 customer satisfaction survey questions you should ask your customers.
Another great idea would be to use a social listening software. You can listen to conversations across social media platforms and know what customers are speaking about your brand, identify business gaps, opportunities and make informed decisions keeping your customers in mind.
4. Be Honest With Your Customers
Being honest and transparent with your customers is one of the most important traits of a customer-centric company. Customers totally love it when you are open and transparent with them!
If you’re running an eCommerce business and your customer is facing a delay in their delivery, let the customer know what the exact issue is. If there’s an outrage or a bug in your software, let customers know the truth and when you can fix it at the earliest.
Your customers will not only appreciate your honest approach but will also grow loyal to your business. And the statistic we saw above tells you how customer loyalty can be a good thing for your business!
5. Leverage Tech to Deliver Great Customer Service
When it comes to customer service, never hesitate to invest in softwares and tools. Being a customer-centric company means doing everything it takes to deliver great customer service and experiences.
By choosing to leverage customer service softwares, you’ll be able to deliver instant, appropriate responses to customers any time they need.
Deploying Conversational AI Chatbots on customer-preferred channels is one way to offer great customer service. AI chatbots with FAQs and helpful articles will not only reduce first response time but also promote the self-serve approach and allow your support agents to concentrate on more complex issues.
Tata Play (Formerly known as Tata Sky), a leading DTH provider decreased their CPR by up to 40% by using WhatsApp chatbots.
You can know how Tata Play did it in this case study.
6. Train Your Support Staff And Take Care of Them
It all comes down to your support staff, doesn’t it?
Your support staff play a great role in helping your organization adopt a service-oriented culture. And that’s exactly why you should train your support staff and make sure they have the necessary customer service skills. In the first point, we talked about instilling values in them. This is where you’ll be training your staff and making sure they are familiar with your products & services.
Conduct quarterly training sessions to make sure your support staff are catching up with the latest developments in your products and services. Ask customers for feedback about your support and use them to train your support staff better. Make sure your support staff are polite, empathetic and go above and beyond when they deal with customer complaints, especially when dealing with difficult or angry customers. You can know how to deal with difficult customers in this read.
👉 8 Proven Ways to Deal With Difficult Customers in 2022
A good idea would be introducing your employees to situation training. Say for example, you can divide your customer support team into two and make the first half of them to be customers. The second half of the team will have to provide support and resolve queries raised by customers (the first half). This can be interchanged after a while. The idea is to put your agents through difficult scenarios and make them better at offering support.
Also, do not forget to take care of your support staff. Only when your employees are feeling great, will they be able to deliver the kind of customer service you expect.
Make sure to conduct feedback sessions regularly and find out what’s stopping your support staff from delivering great customer service. Identify the areas of friction and try resolving them as soon as possible – helps improve the employee experience. Empower them with FAQs or Playbooks, or videos they could refer to provide instant resolutions to customers.
The Bottom Line
Developing a consistent customer-centric culture can help businesses go a long way. Becoming a customer service oriented company isn’t an overnight process. You have to take one step at a time and make sure you reach the goal.
The above-mentioned practices will help your company evolve into a customer-centric organization. All you need to do is, start implementing them and make sure the approach is headed in the right direction by evaluating the results occasionally and modifying the process to become even better – you’ll get there eventually, sooner or later!
Now that you know the steps, why the wait? Start implementing them in your business right away. Get started now!