I read an interesting article the other day on the importance of being customer-centric as an organization. The article makes several strong points, especially emphasizing that if you are going to be customer-centric as an organization, as you should strive to be, you absolutely must have the buy-in of senior management. If you don’t, it’s unlikely that you will be successful in creating, much less sustaining, a customer-centric culture.
If you have senior management’s blessing, great! Go forth, be customer-centric, and reap the rewards! But what if you don’t? What if you suspect that you are going to have to drag your organization kicking and screaming into this new way of thinking? Should you just give up entirely on being customer-centric? Of course not!
You can start with some small changes in how you provide customer care. It’s easy for CSRs in a company-centric culture to be apathetic or even to position themselves in opposition to customers. Remind your CSRs that your department’s goal is happy customers. Their job is to be on the customer’s side, to make the customer feel that they have a voice with the company. That doesn’t mean giving them everything they ask for, but it does mean sympathizing with their problems.
Another thing you can do is ask to be included in planning sessions for other departments. Remember, you are the voice of the customer. Bring that voice to those meetings. That doesn’t mean you get to decide what every department does, or that you can just come in and magically everyone will buy in to your philosophies and ideals about the customer experience and becoming more customer-centric, but it does mean that when there are questions about what will serve the customer best – and there will be – you’ll be there to answer those questions.
As you attend more of these planning sessions and demonstrate that you have the best interests of the company, the department, and the customer in mind, you’ll become a trusted member of the team. Eventually, you’ll have enough of a voice to be able to steer things in a more customer-centric direction.
It can be hard to get established companies to radically change their orientation from company-centric to customer-centric. Change is scary, especially a fundamental change in underlying company philosophy. But not all change has to be big change. Small changes add up over time, and before senior management knows what hit it, your organization will be well on its way to a customer-centric culture.