Being Customer-Centric

So, you listen to your customers, right? You value their feedback, take it to heart, you try to empathize; maybe a negative comment or two from a user even sticks in your head and troubles you at the dinner table, while you're shaving in the morning, or on the freeway driving in to the office. You've covered every base: Google Analytics, webValidator, focus groups, expert pannels, in-store channel impact testing. You think of yourself as being progressive, as riding the cusp of the CRM wave that has crashed down on 21st-century capitalism and altered everything we know about maintaining relationships with the people who buy our products.

And now you're reading this blog, and you're surprised, because I'm in the process of telling you that you aren't doing nearly enough. Yes, by all means, it's impressive, and you are ahead of the game. But unless your organization is customer-centric from top to bottom, you'll never get full value from these wonderful tools. You'll be like a painter, who can avail himself of the most beautiful paints, the largest canvases, and the most skillfully-crafted brushes, but who realizes before he starts his work that he never learned to draw anything more than stick figures.

Too often clients misunderstand the value of the voice of the customer. Listening to customers isn't simply about validating the effectiveness of online and offline marketing/sales channels. Our CEO, Jerry Tarasofsky, has been intimately involved throughout his career in building paradigms to gauge organizational effectiveness. As he can attest to, evaluating the multi-channel customer experience is only one element of true customer-centricity, which must be present in every organizational detail, however minute, for a company to flourish.

Agile and innovative firms preach the gospel of the customer from the CEO down to the data-entry clerk. But getting to this point doesn't come without great reflection, and great work. Moving the customer to the center of your company, though eminently necessary, can sometimes be painful. Toes get stepped on, power structures get toppled, and old ways of doing things get exposed and cast aside. Often, it means a re-evaluation, and sometimes a reconstruction, of the very soul or essence of the brand. Goals like increasing market share and boosting shareholder value might have to be temporarily de-emphasized.

Above all, being customer-centric means more than simply running a few satisfaction surveys, or pouring over clickstream dashboards to try to construct a persona of your clients. It's about something more. It's about giving every person in your company a center (the customer) around which to orient their decisions and a working vocabulary that comprises words like trust, loyalty, fidelity, and integrity--words that people don't typically throw around all that willingly when talking about a company.