Does Technology build Customer Centricity?

Posted On February 21, 2023

In today’s highly competitive business environment, organizations that prioritize customer centricity have consistently proven to be more successful in their operations. This is particularly important for companies that deal with customers directly. Otherwise, the toll of customer satisfaction will be on revenue and market share.

Data around Customer Centricity says

We know, a customer-centric organization focuses on understanding and meeting customer needs. Industry data shows the following.

• A Forrester study found that customer-centric companies experience 17% higher revenue growth than companies that are not customer-focused.

• An Epsilon survey found, 80% of customers are more likely to do business with a company if it offers personalized experiences. This includes personalized recommendations, customized product offerings, and tailored communications.
• A Qualtrics study says, 77% of customers are more likely to recommend a company to others if it actively seeks out and responds to customer feedback. Additionally, 52% of customers will switch to a competitor if they don’t feel their feedback is being heard.
• An HBS study discovered a 5% increase in customer retention can lead to a 25% to 95% increase in profits. Loyal customers are more likely to recommend a company to others, leading to a virtuous cycle of increased customer acquisition and revenue growth.
• According to another study, by Gallup, engaged employees may yield up to 10% higher customer experience scores than companies with low levels of employee engagement.

Technology solves all…

Technology can play a major part, for instance, if one were to apply technology to the above mentioned findings:

• Collect customer feedback, through surveys or social media, to improve products, services, and the overall customer experience.
• Personalization of customer experience, e.g. by tailoring product recommendations or sending targeted marketing messages.
• Omnichannel support for customers, and manage and track these interactions to ensure consistency and quality of service.
• Self-service options can enable (e.g.) online ordering thereby saving customers time and reduce the burden on customer support teams. Same holds for chatbot like use cases.
• Customer relationship management (CRM) systems track customer interactions at an enterprise level, and manage customer relationships. This can help businesses identify opportunities to improve customer satisfaction and loyalty.
• and finally, Customer data analysis, which helps create personas, customer segmentation, figure customer behaviour to better understand customers’ needs and preferences. The customer data ends up being the thread which ties the other elements together. The modalities of what kind of data, data quantity vs data quality and democratisation of data access remain.

… or does it? What about Culture?

However, if it were that easy, most organizations would have been able to throw money towards technology and gotten high on their level of customer centricity. That, clearly, isn’t the case.

Customer Centric culture, by definition should have originated with the customer in mind. It is the antithesis of inward looking, hierarchy dependent, career saving type of a value system. A manifestation of non-customer-centricity is postponing or cancelling a client meeting because there is an unscheduled meeting with a hierarchical superior which has come up. Many companies, and their representatives might have done this to you.

What builds a customer centric culture?

When same / similar behaviour emanates as response to a type of stimulus from the entire tribe, we can consider the behaviour to be part of the tribe’s culture. So how does one build this outward focused behaviour?

Training can build awareness, but not a change to instill the desired behaviour. Neither is this something that HR folk can help with, as this isn’t something you can put on a spreadsheet.

Many organizations, in their marketing spiel, talk about focus on the employee rather than the customer. Their logic being, a happy employee makes for a happy customer. Possible, but not necessary. We have seen labour unions, with zero customer focus, completely destroying organizations. This, of course, doesn’t say that unions were not appropriate in their genesis.

The spotlight, really, is on empathy towards stakeholders, in this case non-internal ones. This is a human feeling, and then an emotional response. The lack of which causes a focus towards internal hierarchy, internal processes, and undue reverence for the supervisor.

Culture starts at the top, at the head of the organization. The right form of Leadership, and Stewardship can build a customer centric culture. This sense of empathy needs to percolate through the ranks, through every leader. Leaders will need to step up, take on a coaching role and show different examples of customer centricity to their teams; and demonstrate the result for greater good.

So when the leader is inward, or hierarchy focused, the rest of the organization becomes so. That is when other employees prioritise an internal meeting over a customer.

On the other hand, success begets success. Implying small pieces of customer centric action, must be rewarded and recognised till the behaviour becomes endemic across the organization and becomes par for the course.

Once the basis sense of empathy exists, then technology can take it steps further with knowing the customer (or a stakeholder) and add action to the mix. Starting with technology will not create the desired culture that we are talking about today.

In Conclusion

Customer Centricity may exist among some humans. But, for it to spread and become part of organizational culture, leadership must set the example. The behaviour needs strengthening with reward and recognition. While this change is in progress, technology must be utilised to enable and add fillip.