Being a customer-centric company is a big deal for any organization. Companies around the world want to become customer-centric company since the last few decades. But a report from CMO Council explains that only 14% of company managers regard customer centricity as their hallmark. For this reason, we can tell that there is still a huge scope for companies around the world in terms of customer centricity.
Understanding customer-centricity is very simple. It is a business strategy where companies put their customer base at the core of every business activity. In other words, customer-centricity is the ability of the company to understand customers’ needs in everything they do. We want our readers to understand different techniques of running a business. So we are bringing this topic to the table. Having some idea about customer-centricity will broaden the knowledge base of all our readers in creating the highest value for the customers.
Steps on becoming Customer-Centric
In the past few years, there has been a series of studies on customer-centricity. And various steps for implementing it have also been found. Many accept customer centricity as a good way of growing their business. A study from Deloitte explains that customer-centric companies are 60% more profitable than those that are not customer-centric. So now let’s see how can a company become customer-centric.
Customer Oriented Human Resource
Every employee working for the company must align with serving customers to build a customer-centric company. Despite their roles, department, and expertise the company must orient each of its employees to create a mindset to serve the company customers. For instance, even software engineers must be given thorough training about the target market, customer segmentation, and customer preferences before assigning them any task. Doing this will maintain a strong impression about the customer which will lead to a customer-centric environment.
HR managers can help in creating such human resources too. They can implement a screening process in a way that can measure their understanding of customer orientation.
Trace Your Customer Journey
A customer journey constitutes all the interactions made by the customer with the company from start to finish. Keeping the records of the customer journey will help to be on track to the customer experience with your company. Having a customer journey map will allow the company to deeply understand the customer’s perspective too.
With the customer journey in hand, every company can understand the needs of the customer in each lifecycle stage. By doing this they can know how well the company meets/ exceed or fall short of the customer expectation. After knowing this companies will have the opportunities of learning and improvements to be made in their customer experience. A better customer experience will then lead to a customer-centric business.
Provide Accessible Data
Most companies have customer data far from the reach of their employees. But when it is available to everyone they will be able to know what’s happening with the customer. With access, they can realize the shortcoming and see spaces for improvements.
Besides the customer data company store other data like sales and marketing differently away from the reach of other departments. All of the customer-related data must be centralized and readily available for the employees. This availability will enable employees to feel the relationship between the customers and them and help them act accordingly.
Having a CRM can help in unifying the platform for employees. Agentcis is an example of one such CRM software which will summarize the customer data in one place. Every user of Agentcis can view their customer data at a single glance in its dashboard.
Study the customer feedback
To become customer-centric one must learn what the customers want and need. And to do this one has to study the customer feedback. Customer feedback will often tell the specific things the customers want. With the same guidance companies can strategic plans accordingly. The best ways of studying customer feedback are through the help of feedback forms, call records and logs, oral feedback, and social media engagement.
Monitor Customer Interaction
Monitoring is one of the final jobs to do while integrating a customer-centric business strategy. The reason monitoring is important is because it will help the company know all the important touchpoints. In the monitoring, process managers have to systematically and routinely collect information on the activities that are going on.
Managers use tools like transactional surveys, call center logs, web feedback, and social media commentary to monitor the implementation of a customer-centric strategy. KPI is set to monitor as well. KPI will help to forecast if the goal is achievable or not.
Conclusions
All businesses around the world work only when they have enough customers to buy their goods or services. Education and migration agencies are no exception to this. The concept of customer-centralization is fairly a recent phenomenon and will require some level of practice. But already many businesses do practice some form of client-centric business approach. So if our readers want they can implement this business strategy and see how it works for them.
