Monique Schoeman

What is customer centricity?

Customer centricity involves every employee within an organisation actively contributing to the creation and maintenance of positive customer experiences. 

It is a mindset and a culture that nurtures the customer’s wants and needs and puts the customer above ROI, service ratings and sales targets.

Do you truly understand your customer and is your organisation customer-centric?

Some of the challenges with implementing a customer-centric strategy in organisations are:

• Change in culture and mindset within the organisation;
• Moving away from a product-centric design to a customer-centric design; as well as
• Utilising customer data effectively and efficiently, to your organisation’s advantage.

Market research on customer centricity

In order to understand the importance of customer centricity and its benefits, let’s look at some market research:

• Loyal customers are worth up to 10 times as much as their first purchase;
• It is 6-7 times more expensive to acquire a new customer when compared to retaining an existing customer;
• 3 out of 5 Americans (59%) would try a new brand or company for a better service experience;
• 62% of global consumers have stopped doing business with a brand or organisation due to a poor customer service experience;
• When it comes to sales, the probability of selling to an existing happy customer is up to 14 times higher than the probability of selling to a new customer.

Being a customer-centric organisation involves more than just putting the customer first. It is about truly understanding the customer and embarking on the customer experience journey. It’s about anticipating their wants and understanding their needs and communication preferences. Creating meaningful and positive experiences for customers, and building lasting relationships with them will ensure customer retention.

What does customer centricity mean for your business?

Customer-centric organisations take steps to understand the customer and act on that understanding by creating a culture that empowers employees to make the best decisions for both the customer and the company in parallel. They take cognisance of the customer journey in everything they do, including how each business decision, process change, and customer touchpoint affect the overall experience.

A sales-centric culture would arguably be more profitable as it is easily measurable, however, the customer-centric approach and strategy have proven to be more profitable in the long term. Customer centricity is focused on a customer-centric approach to designing products, creating real relationships with customers pre-and post-sales, ensuring customer retention, satisfaction, repeat business, loyalty and profit and a successful organisation in the long term.

However, it’s never too late for your organisation to embark on the customer experience journey and benefit from a customer-centric strategy, staying relevant in the market and ensuring longevity and profitability for your business.