Beyond “Faster Horses:” Building a Customer-Centric Culture
The late great Sam Walton, best known for founding both Walmart and Sam’s Club, once famously remarked that “There is only one boss. The customer. And he can fire everybody in the company from the chairman on down, simply by spending his money somewhere else.” Though American business practices have changed considerably since Walton’s passing in the 1990s, his statement is evergreen, and stresses the importance of putting the customer first in business practices. This means developing, delivering, refining, and improving your products and services with your customers in mind. It may seem like a no-brainer, but implementing this customer-centric way of thinking at all levels of your business can be tricky. It requires knowing what your customers want and how to give it to them. It also requires balancing the needs of existing customers with the wants and needs of the customers you’re hoping to acquire while still putting the needs of your employees first.
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Prioritize Employees to Serve Customers Better
And, while it may seem counter-intuitive that building a customer-centric culture would begin with putting the needs of your employees first, that actually is where most experts recommend starting. In According to Annette Franz, a customer experience expert and frequent Forbes collaborator, building a true customer-centric culture means putting the customer first, but putting the employee “more first.” After all, regardless of the company figurehead, your employees are the day-to-day faces with which your customer base interacts. Happy, engaged employees tend to create positive customer experiences, naturally reflecting your business values and culture. When your team feels valued and empowered, they are better equipped to meet and exceed customer expectations
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Listen to Your Customers – Work From the Outside In
The second step to building a customer-centric culture is to work from the outside in. Many businesses make the mistake of assuming they know what the customer wants, but (unfortunately) “if you build it, they will come” only works in Field of Dreams. Considering the customer doesn’t mean telling them what they want, it means letting them tell you what they want. Of course, this can be done in a variety of ways, from the more formal, like surveys and feedback boxes, to the less formal, like checking heatmaps on your website and relying on anecdotal accounts from the employees you made sure to put “more first.” So, which of these should you use? The answer is D. All of the above. Experts recommend relying on a mix of formal and non-formal data collection when it comes to figuring out what your customers want, as different types of customers tend to communicate their wants and needs in different ways.
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Deliver on What Customers Want
Of course, once you figure out what the customer wants, you need to give it to them. Again, that is a deceptively simple statement, but it requires a lot of analysis and hard decisions. After all, the data collected from your surveys, feedback, and heatmaps may not show consistent trends, or current customers may be asking for something different than customers you hope to attract. Sometimes, you just have to make a best guess about what people want, and sometimes you’ll be wrong. At EFBC, we encountered this with our traditional Full Forums. While these peer groups were highly valued by many members, we noticed a need for greater flexibility for those who couldn’t commit to the Full Forum schedule. In response, we introduced a Flex Forum option, offering a more flexible format for members with tighter schedules. While we weren’t quite sure how it would be received initially, the Flex Forum has since become a huge success, proving that anticipating customer needs can pay off.
This is where open lines of communication become key. Make sure you have accessible and proactive customer service, and make sure your employees are able to easily raise any recurrent issues that customers are having. Open lines of communication between your customers and your employees help foster a culture of continuous improvement. Then, show that you are listening! Refining a product or service based on customer feedback is a great way to communicate to those customers that they are heard and valued, which in turn creates loyalty.
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Think Beyond Customer Expectations
Anticipating and responding to customer needs also can require thinking outside the box. To quote another famous businessman, Henry Ford, “if I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.” Where Ford excelled was not in that he gave people something they didn’t ask for. In fact, quite the opposite: he was so attuned to the needs of his customers that he was able to give them the impossible thing they didn’t even know they were asking for. And if you can do that, you’ll not only continue to cultivate the loyal base you already have, but you’ll also expand that base. And that is how you grow as a true customer-centric company.