Customer Centricity (Summary)

Understanding how to determine your value to a customer represents a significant future trend, critical to long term survival.  Businesses are demanding that their service operations take action to become much more customer focused, in an attempt to develop an awareness of the customer’s needs and to understand how to deliver to those needs, to add distinct and differentiated value to the customer. The positive effects of such a policy can be seen in those businesses that are effectively working towards customer centricity.  The list outlines some of the best practices that are being adopted by leading edge companies as they pursue and achieve working customer centric strategies.  The list isn’t long:

1.      Structured contact with customers whether formal or informal

2.      Customer focus and the measurements that prove it

3.      Alignment of processes across the customer interface to enhance their effectiveness

4.      Strong relationship between strategy and delivery

5.      Ability to adapt quickly to changing customer needs

Implementing the practices of Customer centricity requires an honest appraisal of current practice to question whether actions are really being done in the customer’s and the business’s best interests.  Like many things in life, it isn’t rocket science but it also isn’t easy.

Many business managers may claim to be customer focused and will cite numerous visits to customers and regular customer interaction as evidence, but interaction with the customer is not always structured either in the processes followed or the measures then recorded.  In this context the term structured means – designed to draw out the real customer needs without promising an instant solution, but in a format that can be easily accessed and converted into action by the business as a whole.  The importance of structuring the formal contact between customer and supplier cannot be over-stated, as poorly orchestrated contact encourages the perception with the customer that the supplier is inefficient and this can undermine efforts towards building customer confidence and trusting relationships. Structuring does not need to mean losing the personal touch, nor does it make instinctive reactions redundant – these are both very important and a key part of the supplier’s role.