The journey to becoming customer centric takes time, practice and focus.
Obviously, and most importantly, it also requires customer centric thinking.
The latter is the part that can be most challenging for companies.
All too often companies can easily slip into the old habit of thinking from their own, inside-out perspective.
Besides having a solid customer centric, intelligent framework in place, this is when an external perspective is helpful.
Customer Focused Strategy: An Intelligent Framework
Customer centric thinking certainly helps to improve the customer experience.
But no amount of customer centric thinking will compensate for an operational model that prevents customer centric execution.
Customer centric thinking is therefore necessary but not sufficient for peak revenue growth.
Companies must also have an intelligent framework in place that allows for the execution of customer centricity.
An intelligent framework is the table stakes.
To build this, customer centric companies must first have a true understanding of their customer’s total business and point of view.
With this understanding, they can organize their team to map, execute and measure a playbook across the total “customer funnel” to drive repeatable, customer success.
This allows for optimal, operational effectiveness which focuses on spending time with customers as strategic partners to leverage the solution, and automates or improves product lead growth for tactical, product usage know-how.
Finally, customer success metrics and benchmarks are put in place to measure how customers are progressing along the customer journey funnel and how the organization is doing at supporting that.
In other words, data informs a constant effort to optimize and improve customer-focused practices.
Customer Centricity Requires Customer Centric Thinking
Once a company has their intelligent framework designed, it needs to make sure that it can exercise customer centric thinking and not fall into old, bad habits.
All too often companies can easily slip into thinking from their perspective when they forget to think from the customer’s perspective.
Don’t let this happen.
Make sure that your company continues to think about each customer from the perspective of their journey and their larger, overarching desired objective.
Also, make sure the company is continuing to aggregate customer feedback and measure progress along the journey to understand how that journey is evolving so that the company can continue to evolve its understanding of the customer base and hence evolve with them.
Bottom Line: Customer Centricity Take Practice
Customer centricity takes practice and it takes customer centric thinking.
It is easy to slip back into old habits and revert to inside-out thinking.
Make sure your company has a solid operational model in place to support customer centricity that starts with a rock-solid customer journey map that truly represents the customer’s point of view.
If it does not, or if your keeps reverting back to inside-out thinking, consider having an external advisor come in to assist.
There is a lot of value in bringing in an external perspective to help the organization understand where they are tripping up in their thinking.
It is like the power of having a coach.
They will help you understand the blind spots, improve your strengths and continue to “train” you to think from the customer centric point of view.