Do it your own way: Why building a customer-centric company is key to success
By Janet Onyango
Business discourse is unanimous on one thing: company profitability and impact are only possible where listening to and responding to the customer are baked into a company’s culture. The hallmarks of a customer-centric company culture include ongoing initiatives aimed at understanding ever-changing customer needs, ongoing customer outreach, personalized customer experiences and employees who are empowered to innovate to meet customer needs. A well-embedded customer-centric company culture “ends with increased [customer] loyalty, sales and success.” (Steve Hogarty) So how can a company develop a customer-centric culture?
Do it your own way
Define your own approach to being customer-centric. Steve Hogarty advises against replicating industry standards and methodologies around customer outreach in the hopes of recreating the successes of others. “Define your own customer first,” Hogarty advises. “What are their values, their budget, their needs? Then define what would need to change in order to place your customer’s interests at the core of your business strategy.” Hogarty advises reinforcing this methodology with training and open discussion across the organization. “Every company needs to chart their journey… study their clients, see what works what doesn’t, experiment and go with what works,” according to Qhala’s Business Development Manager, Velonah Ndirangu.
Build an executive team that understands and cares about building relationships with customers, perhaps even more than they care about profits, according to Customer Futurist Blake Morgan. The executive team, particularly the CEO, Morgan argues, must understand the value of building customer experience programmes. A CEO who is not focused on the customer, on the other hand, will hesitate to approve customer experience initiatives, especially if they can’t see an immediate financial return to the company.
Be clear about how to measure success. What are the best metrics to measure the success of your customer-centric strategy, besides sales figures? It might be customer feedback or product reviews. It might be total spend per customer or customer retention. The better you understand your customer, the better a company can define metrics and the more useful those metrics will be in informing its customer-centric strategy.
Encourage innovation by building a tolerance for failure, according to researcher Brene Brown. Minimizing red tape, rewarding research and experimentation, nurturing a collaborative environment are ways that a company can empower employees to innovate to meet customer needs. (Entrepreneur.com)
Chris Martin, CMO of tech firm FlexMR, recommends building the following question into all production processes: “Has the customer been consulted?” He also recommends teaching management staff and company leaders to consistently ask the question: “What customer evidence supports this?”. This encourages a culture where every decision begins with the customer.
The Qhala way
Chris Martin’s approach very closely reflects Qhala’s approach to customer-centric product design. At Qhala, every piece of software and every platform is co-created and co-designed with the customer, according to Business Development Manager Velonah Ndirangu. Qhala applies the agile software development methodology: “We have the client sitting with us from the very beginning,” Ndirangu explains. Throughout the production process, the customer is invited to regular demos after every two-week sprint, to see and comment on the progress. “If the scope of the project needs to change, if new requirements have come up, if the business environment has changed, the client is able to inform us as we create the software.”
Qhala applies the same customer-centric approach to designing and carrying out research. The customer outlines their expectations in a terms of reference (TOR) document that will inform Qhala’s proposal to the client. In a second meeting, the client and Qhala’s research team review the research proposal to ensure that it responds to the customer’s expectations. Before the research begins, the parties meet again at an inception meeting to ensure the client and the research team are aligned.
“When we have the client working with us, we make our mistakes early and correct them early so that we can present something with which the client is fully aligned, because they have been with us every step of the way.” Ndirangu says this iterative approach improves timeliness, alignment and increases overall customer satisfaction.
Where a company takes the time to know and consult its customers on product design or service delivery, it is able to better align with the customer and innovate to meet the customer’s particular needs.
