When it comes to customer centricity, skill set and mindset go hand in hand. By fostering one without the other, you will probably see incremental improvements. However, if you want to implement a culture of customer centricity at your organization, building skills and shifting mindsets must be done in tandem. Let’s take a look at the two approaches and how you can tie them together.

Customer Centricity Skills

Successfully serving customers requires certain technical skills that will vary depending on your industry, but there are some universal skills that everybody should learn if you truly want to put the customer first:

• See the business through the lens of the customer experience – This might seem like a simple task, but it actually does take practice for it to come naturally. Individuals in the organization make choices all the time. You want them to make those choices by first asking, “How might this impact our customers?”
• Identify areas of personal responsibility – Everybody is busy, and it’s easy to ignore tasks when it’s not clear whose responsibility they are. Understanding the impacts of taking responsibility (or not) is a skill that can be honed. The more people in the company who possess this skill, the more proactive the entire team will be.
• Take personal action when appropriate – After identifying areas of personal responsibility, it’s time to take action. This is also a skill because it requires understanding the decision-making paths, knowing which barriers stand in the way, and how to overcome them.

All of these skills can be taught and improved over time. However, without building a foundation of a customer centricity mindset, people will be less likely to employ those skills in the workplace.

Customer Centricity Mindset

Creating a customer centricity mindset is a matter of shifting perspectives and ingraining them in the company culture. Some of the factors that contribute to this are:

• Understanding the big picture – Many individuals don’t realize just how much potential they have to impact the customer experience and the organization as a whole. Even people who do not typically interact with customers can influence their experience. Bringing this to light can help shift the perspective from an internal one to considering the customer’s experience in everything you do.

• Feeling empowered to make a difference – The value of understanding the big picture cannot be underestimated, because it can elicit possibilities that leadership might never have considered. For example, in a customer centric culture, a website developer (who never interacts with customers) might take extra care to make an online purchase flow as smooth and fast as possible in an effort to make the customer experience better.

• Feeling invested in the outcomes – When individuals realize that they can indeed have an impact, they are more inclined to feel invested in the outcomes. That same website developer has a choice when working on the purchase flow. He or she can implement an out-of-the-box solution, or he or she can consider the customer’s perspective and create a tailored experience that is designed to delight them. Because he or she is invested in the outcomes, he or she will choose the solution that best serves the customer.

Anybody can adopt this mindset, but without the necessary skills to execute, an initiative to promote customer centricity will fall flat. Individuals need both the internal motivation (mindset) and the ability to execute their ideas (skills). Building customer centricity skills also helps individuals adopt the mindset through regular practice and successes that make them want to continue on that path.

For many businesses, success depends on sales, whether they are made to other businesses or to individual customers. This is one reason why creating a positive customer experience from beginning to end is so important. To do this effectively, you need every individual in your organization on board, even if they don’t interact directly with customers. Every employee must know that no matter what their role is within the company, each person affects the customer experience.

Achieving this type of culture doesn’t happen overnight. It requires a strong commitment from leadership and a sustained effort to shift the hearts and minds of every individual to behave in a customer centric way. The results of these efforts will speak for themselves when the organization becomes more successful.

Why Success Starts with a Superior Customer Experience

Companies today have to provide more than just a good product or service. Customers expect more, and if they’re not getting what they want from your organization, they’ll turn to another company to find it.

Customers Want It

Although the quality of the products or services you deliver is important, it might not be the deciding factor when customers make a purchase. Competitive pricing is also a consideration, but not necessarily the only one. In fact, one study showed that the customer experience is expected to be more important than either price or product by the year 2020, which is just around the corner.

Innovation, quality of products and services, and other factors will always play a role in the success of a company, but the customer experience has become a significant deciding factor that will ultimately impact the bottom line. If you’re not already paying attention to the B2B customer experience your company provides, your organization is at risk of getting left behind.

Businesses Benefit from It

The ROI of the customer experience is not easy to quantify, but a recent report from Qualtrics analyzed feedback from 10,000 customers and found that for a $1 billion company, even a moderate improvement in the customer experience would impact its revenue by an average of $775 million over three years. This is not an insignificant number for any organization, especially considering this is for a moderate improvement. Imagine what a major commitment to improving the customer experience could do for your company’s revenue.

The report also found a strong correlation between the customer experience and the decision to repurchase from a company. This is important because it is easier (and less expensive) to make sales to existing customers than it is to acquire new ones. Keeping your current customers delighted with both your products and the experience they have while purchasing them will only add to your bottom line.

The Customer Experience Goes Beyond Customer Service

Many companies make the mistake of focusing only on the customer service department or the employees who interact directly with customers. The reality is that every individual in the organization has the power to impact the customer experience. The software developers who create the website, the individuals who work on a manufacturing line, and the team that sends invoices all make decisions on a regular basis that have the potential to impact how customers interact with the company and perceive the brand.

Focusing on creating a customer centric culture rather than just on providing customer service training will help ensure that the customer is top of mind when any decision, no matter how big or small, is made.

Becoming Customer Centric Requires a Culture Shift

Your organization can achieve a culture of customer centricity by setting a clear goal, having a strategy that supports it, and ensuring a commitment from leadership to invest the necessary resources to maintain the momentum. Experiential learning is one of the many tools that can be used to create conviction and teach people the skills and competencies necessary for supporting a customer centric culture. By directly experiencing the consequences of their actions in a time-compressed setting, participants leave with the conviction that their behavior truly does matter. This knowledge carries through to the real world and influences the daily decisions that have the potential to impact the customer experience.

Businesses rely on customers in order to be successful, and the customer experience is more important now than ever. The organizations that don’t recognize this or fail to make an investment in customer centricity risk losing market share. To learn more about how your company can stay competitive in the new customer centric landscape, read our free guide, The Rise of the Customer Experience in B2B.

Many B2B organizations recognize the importance of focusing on customer experience in order to drive results and growth—being customer centric is simply good for business. Despite this, most companies are not quite there yet. According to Forrester, only 23 percent of B2B companies have embraced a customer centric approach to their organizational structures. Becoming a customer centric organization may seem like an overwhelming challenge, but making the investment in this culture shift is worth it. When striving to become a more customer-centric company, consider the following strategies to ensure success.

Create Corporate Clarity

Building a culture of customer centricity requires a clear vision and set of values to create a shared foundation. These ideals must be reflected in the actions, behaviors, and thoughts of both leaders and employees when making decisions. The message of customer centricity should be distributed clearly and consistently throughout the organization via meetings, everyday conversations, emails, and company message boards over a sustained period of time. Throughout the transformation to a customer centric culture, reiterate the vision in multiple ways and make it part of the company’s DNA to keep people motivated and engaged.

It’s also important to recognize that just spreading the vision of customer centricity is not enough to create lasting change. It’s essential that every person sees their part in the vision and knows what individual changes they need to make in order for it to become reality.

As more companies are asking what it takes to provide a customer experience that will set them apart, people are getting hung up on definitions and feeling unsure of where to concentrate their efforts. To differentiate themselves, organizations need to adopt a customer-centric mindset. But how is that different from providing excellent customer service?

What is the Difference Between Customer Service and Customer Centricity?

Customer service is what happens at the front line between someone receiving a product or service, and the business that is providing it. In B2C organizations, this includes the interactions between the paying customer and the business. In B2B companies, customer service most often happens between the end users at the organization making the purchase (individuals and departments), and the provider of the product or service (most often the sales and customer service departments).

Then, what is customer centricity? Customer centricity is a value that informs the behavior of the entire organization. It involves every individual at every level of the organization operating under the assumption that everything they do has the potential to affect the overall experience of the customer. Customer centricity includes customer service, but it doesn’t begin or end with frontline staff. Instead, a customer-centric organization considers the entire customer journey, and anticipates customer needs beyond the single transaction.

Adopting a customer-centric culture can have a tremendous impact on the organization and its employees. In fact, researchers at Forrester found that employees at 93 percent of customer-centric companies are happy to work there, compared to only 20 percent of employees at companies that are less focused on the customer experience. In addition, 95 percent of customer-centric companies said their customers are satisfied with their products and services, compared to only 46 percent of other companies. Meanwhile, a Walker study found that even a moderate improvement to the customer experience can impact the revenue of a $1 billion company by an average of $775 million over three years.

With such an impact on employees, customers, and the organization’s bottom line, it’s easy to see why more companies are putting a focus on customer centricity.

What Do Customer-Centric Organizations Do Differently?

Adopting a culture of customer centricity can be a major shift in mindset for some organizations. By definition, it requires the organization to put the customer at the center of business decisions, and work together to consider the total customer experience at all times. Here are just a few of the ways that customer-centric organizations approach work differently:

1. Place the customer at the heart of all decisions and actions

Customer-centric organizations don’t just promise excellent customer service. They define the customer experience they wish to provide and create policies, frameworks, and procedures to make it happen.

2. Empower individual employees

Customer-centric organizations make sure that every individual knows they can take action to impact the customer experience, and that they know the balance between personal judgment and corporate policy when taking such action. These organizations inspire accountability within their workforces; by giving people the ability to do what needs to be done, each individual is able to take ownership of their part in the customer experience.

3.Communicate effectively

Customer-centric organizations break down silos. They understand that the flow of information between departments and functions has a huge impact on the customer experience – especially when something that “looks good” for the customer’s experience when examined in isolation actually causes friction when considered in the context of the entire customer journey. Open communication helps everyone understand and create the desired customer experience.

4. Obsessed over data

Customer-centric organizations seek out data and use it to improve the customer experience. They watch the market and emerging trends in order to anticipate evolving customer needs. They obtain permission to use customer information to personalize individual interactions. They examine referral rates, customer satisfaction surveys, online reviews, and so on, to understand how effective the organization’s customer experience initiatives really are.

Consider Customer Centricity a Journey

Customer centricity is so much more than just providing good customer service, and becoming a customer-centric organization doesn’t happen overnight. It requires a shift in mindset, new policies, and changes in behavior across the organization. To learn more about customer centricity, the impact it can have on your organization, and how to make the shift, check out Eagle’s Flight founder and CEO, Phil Geldart’s book, Customer Centricity: A Present and Future Priority.

“Putting the customer first” sounds like a selfless, lofty goal for businesses. But organizations wouldn’t be so focused on providing top-notch customer service if it didn’t make sound business sense. In fact, Deloitte and Touche reports that customer centric companies are 60 percent more profitable than companies not focused on the customer. But let’s back up for a moment—what is the art of customer centricity, and how exactly does it lead to business growth and success?

Why Customer Centricity Is an Art (Not a Science)

The shape that customer centricity takes in your organization depends on whom you serve—there’s no one-size-fits-all customer centric formula you can simply plug yourself into. In fact, that’s the opposite of customer centricity! This is much more than a “customer first” motto. Customer centricity is an organizing principle, with the customer at the center.

Think of customer centricity as a painting. You paint the customer into the foreground, and everything else in the painting exists to keep the focus on the customer. Taken individually, the elements of the painting that enhance the customer—all of those background techniques—don’t seem to make much of a difference. But if you take them all away, your painting becomes dull and lifeless—the color seems to drain out of your painting’s central figure (the customer). For example, designing an office that feels inviting to your customer (think comfy chairs, a coffee station, and offices full of natural light) may seem superfluous, but it can have an outsized impact on the customer’s first impressions of your organization. Furthermore, the elements that don’t serve to enhance the customer can be reworked, painted over, and redesigned. Customer centricity, like painting, is a process that takes time, trial and error, and practice to perfect!

A company that truly embraces customer centricity organizes the corporate culture around its customers and ensures that departments don’t operate in silos when it comes to interpreting customer data and the customer experience. In fact, “customer service” isn’t limited to just one department—every individual at the company becomes a customer centric artist, striving to see things from the customer’s perspective, taking ownership of the ways that his or her work can directly or indirectly impact customers, and pulling out his or her paintbrush to take action to improve the customer experience.

Discover Potential Areas for Growth

Creating a customer centric culture isn’t easy, as the description above entails. So, why do companies do it? What’s in it for them?

Customer centricity can be a major boon for business, in part because it allows companies to discover and identify potential areas for growth, where new products or services can be created to meet customer needs. When you put yourself in your customers’ shoes, you can more easily see what may be lacking for them—and that spells business opportunity. Relatedly, customer centricity also helps companies develop the right products and services, the kind that are actually going to be used. When you truly understand your customers’ needs, you won’t waste time developing and marketing services that aren’t going to help them.

Create Long-Term Partnerships with Customers

Customers are going to be appreciative of the care that customer centric companies put forth in meeting their needs. When you consistently deliver solutions that are customized to the customer, that gives them an incentive to work with you further. That’s good news for your business’s bottom line, because the statistics show that it’s far more cost-effective to retain current customers than acquire new ones.

However, the reality is that customers aren’t going to stick with you if you ever stray from the customer centric model. Customer loyalty is eroding; today’s customers aren’t afraid to switch companies at the drop of a hat, and they certainly don’t feel beholden to a company due to past good service. What matters is how you treat customers now. A customer centric organization approaches customer retention as a way to create long-term partnerships with customers. Partnerships that will be mutually beneficial and rewarding to both customer and company for years to come.

Sell More with a Customer Centric Approach

Customer centricity can even inspire business growth by reviving a company’s lackluster sales results. Putting the potential customer at the center of the sales process—by researching the customer’s current reality and the climate of the customer’s industry and by identifying the customer’s real and perceived needs—can lead to more (and bigger) sales. Today’s customers want complex, custom-fit solutions, which companies can only sell to a customer when they put themselves in the customer’s shoes. That’s how a salesperson can determine what solution would truly fit best.

Does your organization possess a customer centric culture? If so, how has that contributed—directly or indirectly—to your organization’s growth?

Rather than focusing on customer service or the customer experience, healthcare professionals appropriately concentrate on their patients’ experience. Creating a positive experience goes beyond meeting a certain standard of medical care—it has to do with the entire patient journey, from the first person patients have an interaction with to the very last (and we’re not just talking about medical staff here). Now more than ever, this has become particularly important to healthcare organizations, because patients have more choice and the ability to shop around for their healthcare providers.

In addition, healthcare professionals face challenges beyond the typical customer-provider relationship, because they must adeptly handle sensitive information, physical examinations, and the expected emotional stress that patients feel. Shifting your organization to a patient-centric mindset can help address those challenges and ensure that the entire patient experience is a positive one.

What Is Patient Centricity?

Patient centricity is about more than customer service training—it’s about behaviors. You more than likely already have programs in place that teach employees skills such as how to maintain a positive attitude with patients, handle billing disputes, and so on. To go one step further, consider whether every employee personally understands and believes the power they have to influence the patient experience. What your employees believe will inform their behaviors, and ultimately, the patient experience.

When an organization commits to a culture of patient centricity, the culture must be implemented at every level, especially with those not directly interacting with patients as they be most unclear about their effect on the patient. Creating a patient-centric culture requires every person in the organization to approach every decision with the mindset of “how will this impact the patient experience?” Not only does this make a challenging or stressful situation more positive for patients, it also leads to improved performance in patient metrics, and ultimately, a true, lasting change within the organization that inevitable efforts employee engagement and the employee experience.

5 Benefits of a Patient-Centric Culture

One of the end goals of cultivating a patient-centric culture is to improve patient satisfaction. A culture change, not just skills training, can do this, thanks to:

1. Better Communication

Patients and loved ones are often anxious to hear status updates throughout their journey with you. Whether the news is good or bad, the more clearly and more frequently healthcare professionals communicate, the better the experience will be for the patient. In addition to learning the skills to communicate with compassion, patient centricity also creates the impetus to be proactive about communication so that questions are answered before the patient feels the need to ask.

2. Culture Alignment

Every organization has a culture, including healthcare organizations. When all providers and support staff are on the same page about how to interact with patients in a patient-centric culture, the experience will be more consistent. Get your employees aligned around why your organization does what it does, the vision for how that is done, and the values to live by. This gives everyone a greater purpose and allows them to ensure their everyday actions support them.

3. Empathy in All Situations

Many healthcare providers are naturally skilled at expressing genuine empathy about health issues, but are not always trained to do the same about service issues. The patient experience encompasses every interaction, and when billing errors or other administrative mistakes occur, it’s important for staff—including medical staff—to respond with sensitivity and to help resolve any issues. In a patient-centric culture, employees are able to see beyond their own roles and contribute to delivering what patients need, even if it’s outside the scope of their job descriptions.

4. Employee Engagement

While it’s true that many healthcare professionals and support staff start their careers with a sincere commitment to providing excellent patient service, this can wane over time as the rigors of the job take effect. Organizations that take steps to keep employees engaged and enthusiastic about their work will benefit from the results of a good employee experience and a stronger commitment to the entire patient journey.

5. Less Burnout

Burnout is a real issue for healthcare professionals. Patient centricity encourages employees to look at the bigger picture and take the necessary steps to deliver an exceptional patient experience. Creating an environment in which employees know to look at the bigger picture when they are overwhelmed, and seek help to achieve what’s needed, will allow them to serve others better.

When you strip away the details, healthcare is a business and patients are customers. However, the practitioner-patient relationship is a complex one. Creating a culture of patient centricity is the way to achieve lasting change and the desired results, such as increased patient loyalty, more referrals, and a better return on investment.