Anyone can run a quick search about the benefits of a customer-focused culture and will find tons of reasons, such as:
- Retaining customers
- Attracting new customers
- Differentiating from competitors
- Reducing costs
Most of the CX practitioners I work with know this already and would agree that having a customer-focused culture helps with all of these things.
The reality is that most of our organizations are looking to achieve these benefits. And, where it once may have been considered a "nice-to-have", having a customer-focused culture is now a "must."
Question: So if the benefits of being customer-centric are so clear, what is our problem?
Pithy Answer: Our challenge is in the execution.
Having a customer-focused culture is a choice. It’s a decision. It doesn’t just magically evolve. You can have some great employees who want to do the right thing for the customer. They may be individually customer focused, but that doesn’t mean you have a customer-focused culture. The first step has to be the strategic decision to be customer focused. It has to be intentional.
Has your organization has made the decision and commitment to being customer focused? If not, that’s a good place to start….
Kitty Radcliff
Vice President
It starts at the top, with the CEO and C-suite. For many, their number one priority is meeting s financial goals, so that is where they put most of their time, not really engaging with their customers or their marketing and sales people. I had the misfortune of working for a CEO who rarely left his office or walked down one floor to talk to his employees on the front lines, and rarely went to trade shows to actually talk to customers. Sad.
I agree without a deliberate strategy to develop that culture it is just a meaningless slogan. Many leaders don’t know where to start or what to do. We advocate benchmarking your level of customer centric culture, that takes leadership buy-in but it is a great catalyst to making the changes necessary to really start delighting customers.