Secrets of a Customer-Centric Organization

Companies that master putting the customer first can find sustainable, long-term success. However, it’s not as easy as just thinking the customer’s always right. Rather, it requires a concerted effort to build a customer-centric organization.

But what does it really mean to be customer-centric, and what are the secrets to cultivating this in your business?

Companies Are Prioritizing Customer Experience and Loyalty

In a world where customers seem fickle, businesses need to bring their A-game. That’s especially true since the beginning of the pandemic, where customer loyalty was a fleeting thing. Many people changed brands out of necessity. Others became more sensitive to the customer experience, seeing it diminish to something that no longer met their expectations.

These trends mean that customer experience and loyalty are now a top priority for companies. To enhance this, they’re turning toward customer-centricity.

What Does Customer-Centric Really Mean?

For an organization to work toward something, they need to understand it. A customer-centric organization strives to foster a positive customer experience at every phase of the customer journey. The focus is on building loyalty and satisfaction to make the customer one for life. It also changes how businesses make decisions — putting the needs of the customer and the impact of change at the center.

How to Transform into a Customer-Centric Organization

So, what are the secrets to customer-centricity? Every company will have a somewhat different strategy, but these attributes and positions are universal.

Anticipate What Customers Want Before They Even Know

The heart of customer-centricity is anticipating what a customer’s current and future needs are. Many people can state what they need today, such as software that helps them automate processes. Long-term, however, customers are often unable to formulate what that will be.

Those that are successful at customer-centricity work from a model of anticipating requirements before the customer even knows. That requires listening to customers, understanding the landscape, and predicting opportunities and gaps with analytics.

Allow Customers to Communicate with You Often and in Any Channel

Getting feedback from customers is a goldmine if you leverage the data well. You need a system in place that is constantly seeking this input from customers in a variety of ways. Encourage them to express their opinions in any channel. Use lots of formats like reviews, surveys, and focus groups.

When you receive customer feedback, don’t just tuck it away. Act on it. It’s some of the most valuable data you’ll ever get. It can improve your products, services, processes, and more. If you make changes due to their input, let them know via a blog post or social media. They’ll see that their opinion matters and will continue to share it with you.

Make Support and Service Easy to Access

If your customers need help, don’t make it hard for them to connect with you. That’s a good way to frustrate and lose them. Customers want multiple ways to contact you that work for them. You can manage that through contact center software that enables voice, chat, email, and social media communication.

Your contact center agents can manage multiple queues via many channels in an efficient way. Customers will appreciate the convenience and getting responses faster. You’ll also want to pay attention to the metrics relating to your contact center. Looking at things like first-call resolution, wait times, and transfers can convey the customer experience. Continuing to improve on these metrics should only improve it.

Provide Proactive Customer Support

If you know there’s an issue that will bring in a wave of customer support inquiries, why not get out in front of it? Or, what if your contact center agents hear the same questions every day? Getting that information out to customers before they ever have to contact you would be a welcome surprise.

You can do this by adding new questions and answers to your knowledge base on your website. Contact center software with dynamic notifications is another option. You can send out messages via voice, SMS, or email that offer the fix. For example, if your software platform had a glitch and you fixed it, send out the proactive notification to customers to update their software.

Use Data and Technology to Reimagine Customer Service

Data and technology are critical to building a customer-centric organization. Without it, you won’t be able to scale or glean insights. A robust and feature-rich CCaaS (contact center as a service) platform gives you the tools you need.

CCaaS offers:

• Omnichannel routing
• IVR (interactive voice response) options to get customers to the right agents
• Quality assurance features to gauge agent-customer interactions
• Analytics and reporting to measure metrics around customer experiences and help your staff more strategically to minimize customer frustrations

By leveraging such a platform, you’re making decisions for your customers based on their needs. You have the data to support it and the technology to execute. When you combine these things, it’s much easier to achieve a customer-centric focus.

Intermedia Can Play a Role in Your Drive to Be Customer-Centric

Intermedia understands the importance of being there for customers. That’s why our CCaaS product includes all the features you need to put customers first. It’s a turnkey platform that can transform how you communicate with and support customers. See how it works today.

Rob Oscanyan

Robert Oscanyan is a Senior Director of Product Marketing at Intermedia, where he focuses on helping businesses improve their customer experience using Intermedia's award-winning cloud communications solutions. Rob has over a decade of experience spanning market research, messaging, and elevating the voice of the customer. In his free time, he constantly creating new adventures with his wife, seven kids, and a small army of pets.