How customer-focussed is your business?

A FEW days ago, I received a message from one of our readers that started like this.

“I’m motivated to write to you about your piece on “thank you”. Was it really a business in St. Vincent and the Grenadines you referred to and was the owner a Vincentian?”

The reader went on to say, “thank you is as rare as an endangered species in my book.”

Furthermore, he went on to support his feelings by sharing two recent experiences he had with businesses. First, he reported that he made a partial payment on an account at a store and received a call to remind him that there was still an outstanding balance on his account.

He said he acknowledged the underpayment then pointed out to customer service representative that she did not say ‘thank you’ for making the payment before inquiring about the outstanding balance.

Secondly, he referred to a call he received from a staff at a financial institution reminding him that his insurance renewal date was approaching. He described the caller as “robotic – no appreciation or thanks.”

The reader was convinced that the entrepreneur, I referred to in last week’s article was not from St.Vincent and was pleased when I acknowledge that he was correct.

The reader was of the assumption that excellent customer service is given little to no priority in most locally operated businesses. It is also the assumption that alien companies invest more readily in a customer centricity culture because they recognize the benefits to their bottom-line. Businesses where employees treat customers the way they want to be treated are more successful than those who couldn’t care less about customers’ opinion.

“Customer centricity is the ability of people in an organisation to understand customers’ situations, perceptions, and expectations. Customer centricity demands that the customer is the focal point of all decisions related to delivering products, services and experiences to create customer satisfaction, loyalty and advocacy.” Gartner Marketing Glossary.

In a California Review Management article titled “What is Customer-Centricity, and why does it matter? Authors Hughes, Chapnick, Block and Ray shared strategies that are executed by market leaders to put customers at the centre of their business.

One such strategy was to marry customer-centricity with employee engagement. The authors said that customer-centricity was about cultural transformation and the successful execution ultimately depended on people.

They emphasised the simple truth that you cannot expect employees to treat customers better than they themselves are treated.

They said that market leaders in customer-centricity employ three key practices to ensure that the entire company keeps customers and their needs at the forefront of planning, decision making, and day-to-day execution.

1. “Inspire and engage employees. Improving employee engagement creates a virtuous cycle: That is why companies with best-in-class customer experience have 60% more employees that are highly engaged.

One way to engage employees and help embed customer-centric thinking and practices throughout an organisation is to invest in customer-focused

training and development.

2. Empower employees with customer insights. Arm all employees with relevant and actionable data about customers. Ensure information is shared freely across functions, not just within the Marketing and Sales organisations.

Encourage employees across functions to use such insights to identify and act on opportunities to deliver more value to customers and then reward them for doing so.

3. Start with leadership. Active, C-level sponsorship and support is essential to customer- centricity. “A genuine commitment to serving customers will always exist in some tension with a company’s obligations to shareholders and the self-interest of its employees, so enterprise-level leaders must provide the guidance for how to productively manage this tension.” Because excellent customer service retains customers and extracts more value from them, your business’s customer service experience can make or break your relationship with your customers.

“The simple act of saying ‘thank you’ is a demonstration of gratitude in response to an experience that was meaningful to a customer or citizen.” Simon Mainwaring.