Improving customer experience (CX) is vital for businesses seeking a competitive advantage and increased revenue. According to Bill McMurray, Qualtrics managing director Asia Pacific and Japan, to be able to deliver a great experience, organisations must build a customer-centric culture.
“Organisations need to have a customer-first strategy across the entire business,” he says. “That’s the only way to develop ongoing positive experiences for customers.”
Here are four key ingredients to developing a customer-centric culture:
1. Executive buy-in
Executive support is key for an organisation looking to transform its culture. Customer-centric organisations have supportive leadership teams that help drive home the importance of being customer focused and encourage employees to join its efforts.
“Culture starts at the top,” says McMurray. “Regular CX reviews with senior leaders to discuss issues, assess their impact on customers and the business, and evaluate the viability of potential solutions, can help to ensure sustained support.
“Marketers play a big role in helping senior leadership develop a customer-centric vision. They should survey the organisation’s current state, which means how central the customer is to strategy and daily operations.
“From there they can make a case to executives as to how new customer-focused initiatives should be implemented to help drive an increase in revenue.”
2. CX ambassador drive
A team of CX ambassadors should drive the adoption of the customer-centric culture throughout the organisation. This team can help various leaders promote CX initiatives within their own departments.
“Employees can’t transition to a new organisational culture if they are unsure of the vision and what is expected of them,” McMurray explains.
“A transformation team of CX ambassadors can guide employees to better understand why customer-centricity is vital to the success of the business, how they can contribute, and what tools and resources are available to help them.”
3. Employee engagement
Organisations need to keep employees motivated and engaged to ensure the transition to a customer-centric culture is successful. To do this, they could reward employees for actively participating in CX initiatives and meeting goals.
At the same time, organisations should consider CX tailored training, as well as adding customer-centric attitudes and skills to their onboarding and hiring processes. This will ensure employees start off with a customer-first mindset.
“Organisations can develop programs that make the focus on customer experience fun and rewarding for employees,” says McMurray.
“For example, providing rewards for new ideas or facilitating excellent experiences and sharing these with the team will help to keep staff engaged and wanting to do more.”
4. Customer feedback for continuous improvement
“Customer-centricity is an ongoing process,” says McMurray. “Organisations looking to become truly customer-centric must listen to feedback from their customers and act on it.”
If customer experience benchmarks aren’t met, it is important to investigate and follow up to see how the organisations can improve.
“For example, by using an easy-to-use, yet sophisticated platform, like Qualtrics, organisations can gather real-time snapshots of their customers’ experiences and determine where they can make operational and strategic improvements.
“By gathering this kind of feedback, businesses will be able to continuously improve to offer better experiences for their customers.”