Company Culture is an important aspect of incredible customer experience.
Most of the time, company culture becomes the hindering block for a good customer experience. Without a customer-focused culture, companies can’t create and deliver an ideal customer experience. Most companies that miss the mark on customer experience are usually missing the component of a customer-focused culture.
Customer-centric companies are 60% more profitable than companies that don’t focus on customers.
A customer-focused culture puts the customer at its center and regulates its policies and workflows accordingly. Most shareholders’ growth expectations directly equate to providing a better customer experience. Because better customer experiences automatically mean long-term customer retention, which is always profitable. According to a survey, customers who switch companies due to poor service cost $1.6 trillion to U.S. companies. A customer-focused model is built to move with the changes and trends in customer demands.
Hence, a customer-focused model is much more sustainable than a product-based model. It can ebb and flow, relying on the employee with whom clients interact. However, companies need to engrain this into the culture to prove a consistent hallmark of the organization.
So far in this article, we’ve covered how to understand your customers better and build a customer-focused culture in your company. Let’s dive deeper into it.
Customer-Focused Culture: A Brief
The core concept is pretty straightforward. It revolves around customer experience. It simply means developing a culture with customer experience as a core part of your company’s goals or values.
The proper focus & investment of time and budget requires a more strategic approach and planning. It is not only a marketing problem or a technology initiative.
Hence, companies need to integrate customer support into their company culture as a whole. They need to hire and amalgamate a team of skilled customer service agents. Another important thing is communicating clear values to your employees and making them more confident in what your company stands for.
Customer-Centric Culture = Increase in Profitability
As we mentioned before, customer-centric culture increases customer satisfaction, which increases customer retention, which in turn boosts profitability. It helps you build majority revenue.
It is 6-7x more expensive to attract a new customer than it is to retain an existing one. Hence, building a customer-centric culture is much more effective than solely focussing on acquisition. Providing better customer services is also necessary for establishing high retention rates. 24% of respondents in a survey said that they’d switch brands even after a single negative experience.
Considering the impact it has on retention, customer-centric brands are more profitable. The happier the customer is with the brand, the more likely they are to make a purchase. In a study, Xerox found that customers who rated them a full 6 on the scale of 6 were more likely to buy more products than those who rated them with a 5.
Insight into a single extra point in the rating scale led to a noticeable difference in purchasing habits. This illustrates that even a little effort could be impactful when it comes to boosting your revenue. Finally, it is worth noting that a customer-focused approach can help with the lead nurturing process. When you take the time to answer prospective customer’s questions and provide them with the information they need, you increase your chances of conversion.
5 Unbeaten Strategies That’ll Always Work
Framing strategies for building a customer-focused company seems like a straightforward approach. But it may confuse brand managers at times. Worry not! We have sorted it out for you. Here are 5 techniques or strategies to build a customer-focused culture that seldom fails.
1. Active Listening
Listening strategies are one of the crucial ones when it comes to building a customer-focused culture. How else would you solve your customer queries if you do not know what they want? There is an overlap between listening to your customers and building a customer-centric culture.
The more you seek to understand them, the more you will be able to meet their needs. Many companies even have VoC or voice-of-the-customer programs for this. These programs diversify the sources of feedback and establish an ongoing program for checking in and listening.
This involves analyzing your previous workflows and processes. to map the changes in your organization. You can do this by gathering data and running regular analytics. You can get a 360-degree view of your support process and workflows regularly. You need a system in place to collect and analyze your data. You need to do this at least on a biweekly basis. After analyzing a couple of times, you’ll understand the patterns and be able to reassess them successfully.
I. Feedback & Surveys
The most straightforward approach for customer-facing employees is to simply ask for feedback. And this does not necessarily mean asking a set of scripted questions.
You can send them personalized feedback and surveys. You can ask them if they’re satisfied with your company and services. This way, you can collect suggestions and constructive feedback. You can also take things a step further by sending customer surveys from time to time after they’ve used your products or services. Make it a priority and review them regularly. Several tools are available in the market that make it extremely easy to create surveys that can give you valuable insight into your customers.
II. Meet Your Customers Where They Are
A major part of your customer support involves meeting customers exactly where they want you to meet. If most of your customer base spends more time on Twitter, you should be well prepared to respond to them there. You can usually go for omnichannel solutions or software for this purpose.
Omnichannel customer support software ensures that you can easily provide customer support at multiple touchpoints. 15 years ago, the average consumer typically used two touch-points when buying an item, and only 7% regularly used more than four. Today consumers use an average of almost six touch-points, with nearly 50% regularly using more than four.
A consistent service quality across multiple channels significantly impacts the company’s revenue. Research shows that companies that provide a consistent service quality across multiple channels retain 89% of their customers. In contrast, companies that do not provide a consistent service quality can only retain 33%. Hence, this is a must.
Using your customer data, you can easily evaluate whether you have the right channel mix strategy or not. Adopt omnichannel solutions and make sure whether you’re speaking your customer’s language or just your own. Give a fully integrated, unified customer support experience across various channels and devices and deliver support efficiently. DeskXpand is one such omnichannel support software that helps you set up well-orchestrated support workflows across email, self-service, and other such mediums. Take a free trial and find out more.
2. Make Customer Insights Accessible to your Employees
Employees must understand the customers to adopt a customer-focused mindset. With customer insights accessible to all the employees, they can easily measure and analyze the areas of improvement and make data-driven decisions.
With large-scale customer data metrics, your employees can gain actionable insights. They can get a complete picture of your support culture and enhance that culture by making it even more customer-focused. These insights can help your employees predict the behavior of prospective clients as well. It helps you track team performance and monitor your team accordingly. Real-time updates help you spot problems and react faster.
Example: Adobe Systems provides all its employees with customer insight access. The customer understanding part is not only related to the sales and marketing departments. They created a new department, a combined customer and employee experience team, to facilitate customer understanding. They have also set up listening stations where employees can either go online or in an Adobe office to listen to customer calls. They also regularly conduct all-employee meetings to give updates and insights on the company’s customer experience delivery.
3. Operationalize Customer Empathy into Policies
Empathy is one of the buzzwords that very few companies understand and practice. Customer empathy simply is the ability to identify a customer’s emotional need, understand the reasons behind that need, and respond to it effectively.
Every company and brand must ask themselves these questions. Do you have empathetic customer service policies for frustrated customers? Do those policies honor customer privacy? Do you have company policies to encourage helpfulness, clarity, and honesty?
According to PwC, only 38% of U.S. consumers experience employees they interact with accurately understand their needs. Another survey by Gartner states that empathetic customer process design has a great impact on marketing activities. Customer-focused understanding builds empathy, and empathy builds trust. If customers feel understood and acknowledged, they’re more likely to be loyal to your business. Hence, to instill such a culture, leaders must do more than giving it lip service.
Example: Slack, a business communication software company, operationalizes empathy. Employees spend a lot of time observing customer messages and try to understand their needs intuitively. Customer support specialists research the people they’re serving and create personas based on their observations.
Example: Temkin group of companies, a customer experience IT consulting firm, has developed a model to estimate the impact of customer experience improvement on revenue in various domains. According to their model, a $1 billion company can gain $775 million over three years through modest improvements.
Planning and making customer journey maps to exercise empathy is a great start for providing customer-focused culture. Evaluate whether your customer touchpoints and processes are providing a good, fast and convenient experience. Take a big-picture look at your policies and processes. And implement customer empathy all around the company culture.
4. Customer-Oriented Strategies for Employees
Often brands relate customer care only to the customer support team. They forget that to create a customer-focused culture, they must incorporate this focus into their company’s core strategies.
Employee engagement drives two-thirds of our client experience scores. That proves what we know intuitively: If employees feel good about IBM, clients do, too.
Example: Southwest’s mission statement, “You can’t manage what you don’t measure,” directly demonstrates customer-focused culture. If managers know the impact, results, and consequences derived from quantified data, they will be able to cultivate a customer-centric culture.
Let’s have a look at how you can implement these customer-focused strategies for your employees.
I. Hire for Customer Orientation
Organizations must be clear about their needs and drive for customer-focused culture while interacting with prospective employees. At Hootsuite, the executive of social media management platform, marketing, and human resources do this collaboratively. The hiring manager, regardless of the roles they’re interviewing for, must ask customer-focused questions.
The practice of asking customer-focused questions not only assesses candidates and ensures that every new employee is aligned to customer-centric thinking, but also sends a clear message to everyone — recruits and hiring managers alike — about the importance of customer experience at the company.
II. Incentivize Your Employees
Another technique to encourage a customer-focused culture is tying compensation and incentives to the customers. Donna Morris at Adobe calls this “giving every employee skin in the game.” She says that employees must know customer-oriented attitudes and behaviors. It is the least that is expected out of them.
Example: Adobe has a compensation program in place that ties every employee to the customer. The short-term cash incentive plan reflects the revenue performance as well as customer success measures such as retention. It makes a tangible contribution to customers that every employee makes but also produces organization-wide alignment because everyone is working toward the same goals.
Company leaders are starting to recognize that culture and strategy go hand in hand. Only when customer-focused strategies are supported and advanced by culture will a company realize its customer-focused vision.
5. Are you Investing in Customer-Focused Tech Solutions?
Nowadays, companies use various customer service tools and techniques to gain a competitive edge and build customer-focused culture. Businesses need to make sure that they do not miss out on even a single customer.
Customer-focused support has also expanded its demands; it is not just about resolving customer queries. Businesses constantly need to look out for trends and roadblocks and analyze their customer support. They need analytics and reporting from time to time to be better prepared for the prospective customer-focused service. Many brands use self-service portals and knowledge base solutions to reduce the workload of their agents. As discussed above, an omnichannel solution is a must-have.
Hence, adopting a technological tool that lets you do all this from a single unified interface is utterly necessary. Plus, you will need to access customer data repeatedly to perform various tasks.
Build a Customer-Focused Culture with DeskXpand
DeskXpand is an exceptional help desk management software that helps businesses provide quick resolutions to their customers, simplify their support and help them cultivate customer-focused culture. It is a fully automated, omnichannel solution that caters to all types of business needs. It is a one-stop, fit-for-all solution to all your support needs and serves small to large businesses.
DeskXpand is built by functional experts and developers with certifications in their respective fields. We are an ISO27001 certified development company with 14+ years of development experience. We build products that you can customize according to your present and future needs. We would like to showcase how our product works effectively for your business. Request a personalized demo and find out more.
