Building a Customer-Focused Culture

If you want satisfied customers who are happy to continue doing business with your company and give it strong word-of-mouth endorsements, you need to provide great customer service. That starts with building a customer-focused culture with leaders who are attuned to customers’ needs and capable of adjusting to meet them.Listed below are several great articles and blog posts I’ve read recently about building a customer-focused culture. I think you’ll find them helpful.Building A Customer-Obsessed Operating Model. Forbes: “Your customers get value added services and capabilities from other firms they do business with almost daily. We know year long, even quarterly delivery cycles can’t keep pace. And we believe you have to rethink your processes with your end customers – not just your business stakeholders – in mind. We believe you have to be agile, at scale, and not just within your teams but across the entire organization. That includes Marketing, Finance, and business units design, fund, and deliver to your customers’ moments of need.”How Your Corporate Culture Affects The Customer Experience. Business2Community: “The heart of your culture and brand is in the contact center. This is where you really focus on customers. Your employees touch customers every day, leaving them with lasting impressions of your organization. If you really want to start grabbing customer data, this is the place to start. In a call center, you already have lots of different systems to worry about. Your phone systems, customer relationship management systems, ticketing systems, and much, much more. For quality control, you need call recording and audio mining software, to go back to previous calls and review them.”The Battle for Customer Attention Starts With a Company's Culture. Entrepreneur: “Effective marketing is the art of providing the best answers to your buyers’ questions, and that’s a content problem -- which in turn is a job that flows to just about every employee. Everyone in your business produces content. Everyone has an email address and a few social accounts. Content drives real business value when it connects with your potential customers. Late last year, Altimeter published a report on how to foster a culture of content, to which I was honored to contribute. The research pointed to education, executive buy-in and employee advocacy as key components of a culture of content.”Are You Really Customer-Focused? GoSmallBiz: “Employees in a customer-focused company are given the freedom to make decisions for the benefit of the customer. Instead of strict rules, they have more relaxed guidelines and are encouraged to find ways to take care of the customer. As long as they don’t do anything illegal or immoral, harm the company’s reputation or cost the company money (and sometimes that’s even OK), they are empowered to act with the customer in mind. In an operations-focused company, the employee must seek a manager’s approval for anything outside of their policies or rules.”The Five Essentials of Customer-Centric Cultures. Heidrick & Struggles: “In moving toward an empowered customer-centric culture that leverages talent effectively, leaders must select indicators to gauge performance and track progress for both behaviors and outcomes. While the latter is always easier to capture, leadership is crucial to measure the former: executives must promote behaviors that encompass not only what customers desire but also what the organization unequivocally stands for. This task becomes easier if the talent agenda is tightly aligned with — and fuels — the company’s customer service values. By using robust and timely customer-driven metrics that extend down to the team level, leaders and managers gain visibility into customer satisfaction.”Need help building a customer-focused culture? Contact us; we’re happy to assist.Success Labs is a leadership development and management consulting firm in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. For more than 25 years, our expert team of consultants has worked with hundreds of companies to explore their business potential and improve their company and cultural performance. Contact us to get proactive about your people strategy.