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How to Build a Customer Centric Business: The Complete Guide

By Talo Thomson

Published on August 2, 2022

Everyone wants to feel heard and understood. As a company, this applies to how your customers feel about your brand. Are you listening to what they need? Are you responding to these needs as you develop new products and services? Moreover, what’s the customer journey like, as they experience it?

Modern businesses may have hundreds of touchpoints across a customer’s lifetime. Every touchpoint represents a chance to delight that customer and reinforce loyalty. Similary, every touchpoint offers data that can help you improve that customer experience, from the number and duration of support interactions to the intuitiveness of your website. Analyzing this data can build your ability to anticipate a customer’s specific needs.

But customers aren’t data; they’re people. Customer centricity uses data to help organizations engage with people and build brand loyalty. Internally, it empowers those across your business to provide better service and a more tailored customer experience. Let’s explore what customer centricity is, why it’s important, and some best practices for building a customer-centric business.

• What is customer centricity?

Customer centricity is the discipline of deeply understanding and delighting customers. Gartner describes it as “the ability of people in an organization to understand customers’ situations, perceptions, and expectations.” But why has this practice become so popular? Because customer centricity is good for business. Harvard Business Review found that customers who have a good experience spend 140% more than others. Also, 64% of companies with a customer-focused CEO are more profitable than competitors and enjoy nearly double the customer retention rate.

Great experiences, thoughtful customer service, and personalized offers are all examples of customer centricity. Rather than simply pushing products, customers want to be met in context to their needs. This makes the digital channel even more powerful, but only if customer data is used wisely. By considering the buyer’s journey across the marketing, sales, and customer service funnels, you can build long-term relationships that enhance revenue and enable long-term growth.

• Why is customer centricity important for businesses?

Customers drive business success. Building an organizational culture around customer satisfaction creates happy customers, which in turn makes a profitable business.

So how do you become customer centric? When creating a customer-centric strategy and culture, every step of business development should include a focus on the customer.

Customer Centricity in Practice

A customer-centric business focuses on finding its core customer base. Define your products, services, and strategies from customers who gain the most value from what you offer and who return that value to your business.

In practice, this means:

Collecting data about your customers

Reviewing customer data to gain insights

Defining a high-value customer

Focusing on customer problems and challenges

Responding to customer feedback

Training employees to think about what customers need and don’t need

Building out future plans that focus on evolving customer needs

No company can be all things to all people. As a business, it’s a good idea to prioritize and focus on the customers who help generate the most revenue. When you’re building a customer-centric business strategy, it is best to avoid:

Treating customers as a generalization about an “average” persona

Chasing after all customers

Spending too little on high-value customers

Making assumptions about evolving customer needs without the data needed to support it

Ongoing analysis of customer needs is essential. Whether you pursue surveys, focus groups, or research in the field, it’s important to continue learning about your ideal customers and how their needs are shifting. As Paul Leinwand points out, “The greater the engagement with customers, the more you learn; the more you learn, the more you improve the value proposition; the more you improve the value proposition, the more trust you generate (by delivering on your promise), and the more you gain engagement and an opportunity to learn.” (Beyond Digital: How Great Leaders Transform Their Organizations and Shape the Future, page 71.)

Organization-centric Culture vs. Customer-centric Culture

Organizations and customers have a symbiotic relationship. Organizations offer a product or service. Customers recognize that it solves a problem. Your organization continues to evolve this already-appreciated product or service based on customer feedback and changing needs.

However, you may need to shift your perspective to make sure you’re really creating a customer-centric strategy and culture.

Organization Centric

Businesses are often started to solve a specific problem. However, once you start building a customer base, it’s important to shift away from how you perceive the problem to how customers define it for themselves.

In an organization-centric culture, strategy focuses on:

We need to sell something to our customers.

We need to build relationships with our customers.

We want to make money from our customers.

While none of these objectives are bad, it’s a case of starting with “we” and ending with “customer” when thinking about strategy.

Customer Centric

Moving toward a customer-centric culture means thinking about the customer before you think of your business.

In a customer-centric culture , strategy focuses on:

The customer needs to solve something, and we can help them.

The customer expects a certain type of relationship from us, and we need to provide it.

Th e customer needs to see the value we provide before paying us.

Even though the outcomes of both may be the same, shifting your thought process is fundamental to success.

• What Are The Benefits Of Customer Centricity?

A customer-centric strategy enables organizations to build brand loyalty, which ultimately generates more revenue. Deep customer understanding enables companies to better tailor value propositions to individuals and opens the door to cross- and up-selling opportunities.

Explore some additional benefits that a customer centric approach can unlock:

Customer Acquisition

All interactions across the buyer’s journey should speak directly to pain points and benefits of your product or service. This doesn’t just make the customer the hero in your brand’s story; it answers their key questions and demonstrates your understanding of their challenges (which in turn accelerates their transition from prospect to customer).

Using data to understand customers’ needs allows you to:

Provide meaningful educational marketing materials.

Communicate in a way that rings true for your audience.

Ensure that customers have the information they need.

Accelerate the sales cycle.

Reduce customer acquisition costs.

Improved Customer Experience (CX)

If your brand sets expectations during the buying journey, it’s vital those expectations are achieved after a purchase is made. Failing to fulfill customer expectations will cause your brand to suffer. This means that customer service and success experiences need to match the promises set early in a buyer’s journey.

Using data to understand your customers’ experiences means:

Reviewing customer feedback after an interaction. What’s not great and needs work? What’s good but could be better?

Focusing on what made an experience positive to try to reproduce it. Why was this campaign successful? What can we learn?

Gaining visibility into areas of improvement. What do people dislike? How can you address it?

Establishing and monitoring metrics that validate improvements. Are we improving click-through rates?

Customer Retention

While any purchase is good for business, repeat customers are what enable you to maintain profitability levels and continue to grow. Happy customers pay it back and pay it forward with their loyalty. Not only do they continue to purchase from you, but they recommend your products and services to others.

Using data to retain customer loyalty enables you to:

Incorporate evolving needs into your growth strategies.

Iterate products or services that don’t currently meet customer needs.

Develop new products or services that respond to market changes.

Give customers the confidence to advocate on your behalf.

• What are the challenges businesses face in implementing customer centricity?

Siloed Customer Data

Customer centricity touches all aspects of your business, from marketing and sales to product development and customer service. The problem many companies face is that each department has its own data, technologies, and information handling processes. This causes data silos to form, which can inhibit data visibility and collaboration, and lead to integrity issues that make it harder to share and use data. Teams may also struggle to trust data, which can slow down processes as they investigate its origin and any transformations.

Legacy Technologies and Manual Processes

Customer centricity requires modernized data and IT infrastructures. Too often, companies manage data in spreadsheets or individual databases. This means that you’re likely missing valuable insights that could be gleaned from data lakes and data analytics. A modern data stack ensures transparency and collaboration across job functions and departments, enabling smooth data handoffs across the organization.

Customer Data Privacy And Security

Modern customers care about data privacy . While customer centricity builds loyalty, a data breach can instantly undermine that strategy with even the most loyal customers. Legacy technologies, siloed data , and manual processes make securing data and protecting privacy much more expensive and risky.

After investing to develop these critical customer insights, a security breach can quickly damage trust and compromise the value of that data. An active data governance program helps maintain robust data privacy and security processes, empowering data leaders to consider where sensitive and personally identifiable information (PII) data is stored, transmitted, and processed, while also keeping that data secured more effectively.

• How To Build A Customer Centric Business: 4 Best Practices

The benefits of creating a customer-centric business strategy and culture far outweigh the costs. Here are 4 best practices for building a customer-centric business:

#1 – Find the Technologies To Support Customer Centricity

Before you put any processes in place, it’s important to have the right tools to get the job done. Fundamental to any customer-centric strategy is your Customer Relationship Management (CRM) platform.

To support the CRM, it’s important to have technologies that:

Provide analytics for insight into business performance.

Leverage intelligence to anticipate customer needs.

Automate business processes to reduce or eliminate manual tasks.

#2 – Use Data To Understand The Ideal Customer

With the right technology in place, you can start digging into the data. This helps you find high-value customers so you can focus on their needs.

As part of this, it’s important to have analytics to help you identify:

Customers who generate the most revenue.

Customers with a long-term relationship.

Customers who report a high satisfaction with your services/products.

:#3 – Review Customer Experiences To Assess Your Strategy and Culture

Measuring your customer-centric strategy means knowing whether you’re meeting customer expectations or not.

Reviewing data is important to gaining insight into whether:

Products and services lived up to expectations set during the buyer journey.

Customers are satisfied with customer service and customer success representatives.

Customers trust your brand and organization.

#4 – Use Data To Define Product Roadmaps and Services Offerings

Products and services must evolve with the changing needs of customers. What you provide today may not solve tomorrow’s problems. For this reason, it’s important to continuously engage in customer and market research.

Some data to consider incorporating includes:

Market trends.

Product/service usage data.

Customer advisory board feedback.

• What are real-world examples of customer centricity?

Customer centricity means being customer-obsessed, and anticipating rather than reacting to what people want.

Albertson’s

What if a grocery store could offer personalized coupons to customers based on their unique purchase history? Albertson’s loyalty program team used data as the foundation of their customer-centric program by digitizing and personalizing their traditional grocery store flyers. They started by:

Finding the right customer data.

Understanding and trusting the algorithms.

Collaborating with another team to accelerate the plan.

Using Alation’s curated data catalog, the company’s California-based data analysts efficiently collaborated with their peers in the Philippines to optimize their analysis efforts. Alation helped to streamline the process, as the data catalog connects information, articles, and conversation with helpful metadata.

The results of this project were:

Time-savings ROI of 3000%.

Data analyst onboarding time was reduced by 83%, from 1 year to 2 months.

Data discovery was conducted 67% times faster.

300% more redemptions from personalized email campaigns over paper campaigns.

$300,000 in additional funded redemptions

Spark New Zealand

As the leading telecommunications provider in New Zealand, Spark’s customer-centric business strategy relies on:

Creating a simple, intuitive customer experience and digital journey.

Using customer insights to deliver the right products at the right time.

Delivering a smart, automated network with advances in 5G and internet of things (IoT) technology.

Internally, Spark was able to democratize data , creating a single source of customer data by integrating Microsoft Azure, Snowflake, and Alation’s data catalog. Together, analysts, data scientists, and the company’s customer-facing teams collaborated to improve marketing campaigns, customer engagement, and products—ultimately improving customer centricity.

50% gain in analyst productivity.

75% faster onboarding of analysts and data scientists.

500 potential Alation + Snowflake users across the company.

• How does a business measure customer centricity?

Measuring your customer centricity requires collecting and analyzing data from across the entire customer lifecycle. First, define the key metrics you’d like to track, and then identify the necessary data required to track those metrics. Here are a few typical metrics for gauging customer centricity:

Customer Value Score

Your customer value score requires two types of data:

How often a customer purchases from your company.

The revenue that customer generates.

For example, you may have a customer that makes a small purchase every week or a customer that makes big purchases a few times a year. At first glance, the large customer may appear to generate more revenue because the individual purchases are larger, but if you dig deeper, it may be that more frequent yet smaller purchases add up over time.

The customer value score will highlight which customer profiles matter most to your business and help you focus on the right market segment.

Customer Churn

Customer churn shows how many customers are lost over time. It doesn’t forecast the future, but it does help identify areas of improvement for products and services.

For example, you might have four different product offerings. If you find that one of them has a high customer churn, you’re not meeting customer expectations for that product. As you make improvements, tracking customer churn will help you determine whether the business is meeting expectations and satisfying customers. If you see a decrease in customer churn over time, you’re on the right customer-centric path.

Net Promoter Score (NPS)

NPS answers the question, “How likely are you to recommend the product/service?” This metric shows whether your current customers are willing to advocate for your brand.

The three categories of NPS are:

Detractors: These are unhappy customers who can disparage and hurt your brand by sharing negative experiences.

Passives: These customers are satisfied but they don’t have a deep investment in your product or service, meaning they could jump to a competitor.

Promoters: These are loyal fans that plan to keep buying and will talk about you to everyone in their network.

A high percentage of promoters often means that customers are satisfied and you’re meeting their expectations. On the other hand, passives and detractors provide a lot of visibility into customer needs that aren’t being met effectively.

• How Alation Helps Businesses Become Customer Centric

Customer centricity is about people and relationships, but it scales only by relying on data instead of anecdotes and one-off conversations. Data gives you the insights to build these interpersonal relationships. It will also help you determine what’s important to customers and what enables your business to compete in the marketplace.

Alation’s data catalog makes customer centricity trackable, easier, and more effective. It enables you to ensure data is integrated and trustworthy, so you can build customer data lakes with only valuable content. For self-service analytics to succeed, all users must trust the integrity and usability of the data. Alation aggregates and analyzes data collected by phone, text, social media, chat bot, email, or in-person, eliminating fragmented data silos and conflicting customer information.

As you build out your product and services roadmaps, Alation gives you the ability to access real-time data from internal and external sources. We deliver a single location for discoverable, trusted data so customer teams can easily identify new partnerships or market segments. In the data catalog, an omnichannel view of customers enables analysts to discover holistic insights across the customer journey and build personalized products that build deeper connections with customers.

Customer trust is central to your customer-centric strategy. Alation provides a comprehensive set of governance and data protection capabilities that promote an ethical data culture so that you can satisfy customer data privacy expectations. With data as the foundation of your customer-centric business strategy, Alation enables you to use your data to gain meaningful insights that drive better outcomes.

Curious to learn more about data-driven customer centricity? Read the Nebraska Furniture Mart Case Study to see how they use Alation to improve customer impact analysis.

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How a commitment to customer service can help your business grow

Helpcrunch benefited from building a customer-centric business. here's how..

Our platform was built on the idea that every customer deserved unmatched service at all times. And businesses should have all the necessary resources to provide it without juggling dozens of tools and spending a fortune on them. The HelpCrunch customer communication tool would become the remedy for both challenges.

The idea wasn't exactly new, and the competition on the market was already stiff. But that's where our own customer service entered the picture. Instead of the "show me the money" attitude often demonstrated by our mature rivals, we could afford the luxury of staying sincere and genuine in our client communication . Customer service became our trademark. 

So, what does being customer-centric exactly mean? Let me tell you our story.

How to build a customer-centric business

A customer-centric business puts its customers at the center of every initiative. Their goals and objectives are two main driving forces behind every business decision—from marketing strategy to product development .

When you start a new business, you do it to solve an urgent problem for a group of people. There's no two ways about it: you do it for customers. But here's the issue: somewhere along the way, owners begin to lose this sense of purpose in favor of more urgent challenges. How do I attract reliable investors? Is my sales funnel effective? Can we earn enough money to pay salaries? Why does the office coffee machine always make terrible coffee?

That is exactly what we at HelpCrunch wanted to avoid at all costs. A customer service software provider without a client-centric strategy is the worst case of a cobbler without shoes. 

We've never doubted for a second the importance of attentive support. We knew from the start that loyalty and retention weren't just marketing buzzwords . And today, we're proud to say that putting all our effort into customer service and customer-centric product development allowed us to achieve the following results:

4.8-star score on Capterra and 4.7-star rating on G2

Customer satisfaction level of 95% and higher

Churn rate around 4% (a pretty good result for a small business, where the commonly accepted benchmarks are 3-5% )

All we had to do is practice what we preach and put a customer service strategy at the heart of our business. Here are the three activities that became the cornerstones of our modest success.

1. Prioritize the roadmap in cooperation with customer service

The day we rolled out the first MVP version of HelpCrunch was probably the day we also received the first feature request. Our customer support team (rather, at the time, our customer support person ) had been the first to receive all kinds of feedback. They quickly learned that a prompt first answer and accurate prioritization are the most important parts of the job.

From day one, every feature request we've received has been stored in a designated Google Sheet along with the contact information of anyone who's made the request. Some inquiries are repeated more often than others, so we also added a tagging system inside our platform, so we could tag for things like Zapier, chatbot, knowledge base, co-browsing , and so on.

Whenever someone asked for a feature that we didn't have, our support team marked it with the corresponding tag and transferred it to a unified database.

Product managers could then easily track the popularity of various requests and adjust our roadmap accordingly. That's not to say that we didn't have our own vision. But staying responsive and flexible for our customers has always been more important for us. 

Several factors contribute to whether a particular feature is going to be delivered soon:

How long is it going to take to design, create, and deliver?

How many human resources does it require?

Does it in any way impact other functionality as well?

To give you a better understanding of how we balanced being customer-centric and keeping a cold head, here's the story behind our Zapier integration . If our customer support reps had a dollar for every time someone asked them about it, they could've started their own HelpCrunch after the first year.

People want to integrate all their disconnected tools into one well-oiled system, and Zapier allows them to do just that. So the high demand wasn't that surprising. But as popular as it was, we couldn't deliver it for a long time because of our outdated API. So first, we had to rewrite our API from scratch and migrate the entire HelpCrunch platform to it.

Did we know that the new API was long overdue? Sure. Did people requesting the Zapier integration so much help us put things into perspective and speed things up? Absolutely.

Zapier is a no-code automation tool that lets you connect your apps into automated workflows, so that every person and every business can move forward at growth speed. Learn more about how it works .

2. Follow up on old leads and re-activate them after each feature release

Why was it important to mark each chat with the corresponding tags? And why did the Google Sheet contain contact information? Because delivering new features means nothing if you don't let people know about it. (Customer centricity and putting people first, remember?)

Each time the product and engineering team rolls out new functionality, not only do we include it in one of our regular marketing newsletters , but we also use it as a pretext for personal follow-ups.

There are two ways to do it effectively:

If a feature is less popular, customer service reps can just copy the contact information from the spreadsheet and send a few emails manually.

More frequently requested functionality requires some automation . So our support agents usually compose a semi-personalized email and send it to all contacts marked with the corresponding tag.

Here's an email our customer success manager sent to the old leads about the Zapier integration:

The reaction was stunning. The open rate varied from 33% to 43.4%, depending on the country. One customer's exact quote was, "That is super great news. We are looking forward to migrating to HelpCrunch in the near future." Music to every business owner's ears.

Compare it to a more depersonalized marketing announcement. Given how important this particular feature is, we've put a spotlight on it there as well. But the immediate reaction was rather chill in comparison.

It's not surprising that personal follow-ups from customer support got such positive traction. They're sent as a friendly note to people who have expressed explicit interest in the subject. No one could've asked for more.

3. Keep your business rating at 4.7 stars or higher

You're more likely to buy something if it has positive reviews, right? One of the best ways to get good customer reviews is to offer helpful and genuine customer service. Support reps are often the ones that communicate with your customers or clients the most, so they're going to leave an impression. You want that impression to be excellent.

That's why we ask people to rate our product after providing them with an outstanding support experience. Would you rather endorse a product after a depersonalized NPS survey, or when a company representative wrote to you personally and offered a feature built specifically for you?

Customers play a crucial role in building your brand image and promoting it all over the internet, so we use a couple of strategies to ask customers for their honest reviews:

Support reps send customers a chat message at the end of a conversation, asking them to review our platform. It only happens after people express their explicit satisfaction with timely and relevant assistance.

The marketing team has an automated email sequence based on customers' satisfaction scores. If people rate their chat experience as perfect, it can mean they're open to giving you a well-deserved endorsement elsewhere.

Bottom line

It's impossible to overstate the importance of meaningful customer relationships for a small business. While big corporations are all about pushing clients down the sales funnel, little companies can and should bring their souls to work. And what better way to do that than via direct communications? Where you can't beat the competition in features, you can make up for it with excellent customer service and attention to detail.

At the same time, small businesses are often intimidated by providing customer service. Some imagine that it takes a huge call center with dozens of operators, while others think of their companies as too small to even care about such things. But in reality, it all comes down to the right communication channels and proper prioritization. 

A live chat window that's only active during your operating hours and an email contact form don't require unsustainable resources. At the early stages, one person is all it takes to be there for your customers. So, don't hesitate to place your clients on a pedestal and provide them with worthy customer service.

​This was a guest article by Lidia, Head of Outreach at HelpCrunch. HelpCrunch is a one-stop platform for building meaningful relationships with your customers via live chat, self-service, email automation, popups, and more. Want to see your work on the Zapier blog? Read our guidelines , and get in touch.

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Lidia Bondarenko

Lidia is a blogger behind HelpCrunch. Her free time she spends searching for new marketing trends and TV shows, and practicing yoga. Follow her on Twitter @Liya_Bondarenko.

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A 5-Step Roadmap for Becoming a More Customer-Centric Company

Sponsor content from Salesforce.

A Five-Step Roadmap to Become a Customer-Centric Company

By Brian Solis

To drive growth in this new economy takes more than transferring existing models and processes to digital touchpoints. It requires digital innovation centered around a connected customer with ever-evolving expectations.

Leading brands are learning to transform operating models and processes that support digital-first customer engagement while exploring opportunities to create value in new ways. It’s a fundamental shift from selling to understanding customers.

Rob Birse, head of global B2B ecommerce at Kellogg’s, points to technology and a customer-centered mindset for “unlocking innovation to help retail channel customers see opportunities for growth in new and unprecedented ways.”

Historically, it was challenging for Kellogg’s to engage their small retail customers due to economies of scale. Now, Kellogg’s is developing tools for enhanced digital engagement across the entire supply chain and providing store owners with access to critical insights they need to grow their businesses.

“Now, our retail customers access dashboards to view their store’s performance and compare against other stores with similar qualities,” Birse says. “This insight, coupled with more meaningful engagement from Kellogg’s and our distribution partners, is opening up opportunities for customers to learn, optimize, and grow in alignment with consumer expectations and evolving behaviors.”

So where do you start?

Based on research in partnership with Harvard Business Review Analytic Services , in addition to advising executives about digital transformation and innovation over the past 20 years, I’ve outlined five phases of customer-centered business and digital transformation to help you chart your own path ahead.

1) Adopt a Customer-Centric Mindset

First, you must embrace a customer-centric mindset and commit to uniting around the customer and the employee.

• Set a vision and strategy for unified customer engagement across your organization.
• Make it easy for employees to make it easy for customers.
• Shift from selling to the customer (product-centric) to serving the customer (customer-centric).
• Form a cross-functional steering committee to chart and manage a customer innovation roadmap.
• Optimize decision making to accelerate experimentation and transformation.

2) Foster a Customer-Centered Data Culture

Place customer insights at the center of operational transformation.

• Build a deliberate path to achieving a single source of customer truth.
• Train and educate your employees on digital-first customer and data proficiency.
• Facilitate access to trusted real-time data sources across the customer’s journey, making it easy for customer-facing employees to find relevant information.
• Build a center of excellence to cultivate data expertise and promote the voice of the customer.
• Create defined customer feedback loops.

3) Prioritize Customer-Centered Digital Transformation

Improve and reimagine the customer experience (CX) from the front to the back office.

• Identify customer friction and opportunities to improve experiences—and deliver new value. Birse of Kellogg’s advises companies to focus on resolving customer issues as the primary justification for any new program. “When you resolve pain points at scale, you unlock revenue streams.”
• Define the new capabilities both your business and information technology (IT) functions need to support new experiences —and agree on the most critical outcomes your organization needs, and how to measure them.
• Align IT and business leaders on a 360-degree digital operating model to improve CX and raise customer-facing performance.
• Create a single enterprise digital governance model that underpins and supports the working digital operating model.
• Provide technology expertise to help business leaders understand how to maximize shared processes, application programming interfaces (APIs), and data, and reuse these resources across your company.
• Use shared data, processes, apps, and APIs to create capabilities quickly.

4) Pursue Customer-Centered Operational Transformation 

Reimagine operations around customer insights, integration, and collaboration.

• Align sales, service, marketing, commerce, IT, digital governance, and analytics to create one team organized around the customer.
• Unify the organization’s functions and operational models to support cohesive customer engagement.
• Adopt customer-centric business processes.
• Make fundamental shifts in your products or services, and how teams work together, to deliver the value and experiences customers seek.
• Anticipate and respond to changes in customer needs.
• Embrace agile methodologies to support infinite digital transformation.

5) Embrace a Customer and Employee-Centered Workplace

The formula for enhancing CX is to empower the employee experience (EX).

• Design EX to deliver a unified CX.
• Invest in systems, tools, and processes that allow and encourage cross-team collaboration.
• Train managers and employees to empathize with customers and team members, to ask the right questions, and to be good listeners and storytellers.
• Apply incentives to individual behaviors that drive business goals.
• Encourage groups with different skill sets to solve customer problems together.
• Give teams the authority to act in the customer’s best interest.

Customer behaviors and expectations have changed the trajectory of digital transformation—and, more importantly, the future of business. Now, businesses must use advanced technology and data to reimagine business and organizational models to become more human-centered.

Learn how Salesforce is helping companies unite their marketing, sales, commerce, service, and IT teams around a single view of the customer with Customer 360 , the world’s #1 CRM.

Brian Solis is Global Innovation Evangelist at Salesforce. He’s also a world-renowned digital anthropologist, keynote speaker, and eight-time best-selling author.

Read More from Salesforce:

• Why Going Digital Isn’t Enough to Meet the New Customer Experience (CX) Imperative
• A Blueprint for Becoming a Customer-Centered Company
• 8 Steps for Building a Culture of Data-Driven Empathy
• Here’s What Happens When You Focus on Employees to Better Serve Your Customers

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How to Create a Customer‑Centric Business Strategy

Mailchimp's advice for building customer relationships.

On the surface, “customer-centric” may seem like a pretty obvious business strategy. Of course, you want your customers to have a positive experience. Of course, you care about their needs and want to make and sell things that make them happy, which of course leads to more business, more loyalty, more customers, and of course more profit.

But like any good marketing tenet, there are layers to it and plenty of ways to achieve it. And you should want to achieve it, too. According to Econsultancy , one of “the most critical qualities of effective digital leaders is being ruthlessly customer-centric.”

Easy, right? But there’s more to it. Starting, for instance, with the definition.

Today, customers have higher expectations than they have ever had in the past. If you want to rise to meet the expectations of your clients, you need to take a customer-centric approach.

Customer service is more important than ever before, and you need to have a customer-centric mindset if you want to not only acquire new customers but retain the ones you have.

Learn more about the importance of a customer-centric company model below, and do not hesitate to reach out to an expert who can help you.

What does it mean to be customer-centric?

You put your customers first. Not many small businesses would say otherwise. But, as NGDATA writes , “businesses that take a customer-centric approach do more than say they put their customers first; they make it a priority to provide an exceptional customer experience at the point of sale and after the sale to increase profits and gain a competitive edge.”

Indeed, and that’s what it means to have a customer-centric ethos in the day-to-day life of your business. “Truly customer-centric organizations identify their most valuable customers and ensure their satisfaction,” NGDATA continues. “In order to do this, organizations gather customer data from multiple sources and channels and target their most profitable customers with relevant offers at the right time.”

Data is where it all starts . When you have a solid understanding of your customers (everything from purchasing habits to interests to engagement history ), that can inform your future business decisions. For example, you can get to know your audience better and find new ways to market to them when you use the core of Mailchimp’s Marketing Platform, our Marketing CRM .

Looking to dive even deeper? Try these 4 simple steps to turn customer data into targeted campaigns that sell more stuff . You’ll learn how to collect, manage, and use audience data that will help you market smarter in Mailchimp.

The importance of a customer-centric approach

The reality is that if you do not both acquire new customers and retain the ones you have, your business is not going to survive. This is the biggest reason why being a customer-centric business model is so important.

As a business, if you forget that your top priority should be your customers, your organization is doomed to fail. Without a strong customer-centric strategy, you could end up building the wrong products or focusing on the wrong services.

Ultimately, this could cause your customers to lose faith in you and your business model, placing you in a difficult position. Therefore, to avoid this issue, you need to focus your strategy on your customers.

Facing the challenges of becoming customer-centric

Now that you know what it means to be customer-centric and how a Marketing CRM solution can help get you there, let’s talk about the challenges.

As the e-commerce world has grown and customers have been faced with ever more options for their buying needs, it’s become ever more simple for those consumers to quickly and easily compare brands.

But if you’re going to be truly customer-centric, you should start by taking a hard look at how you communicate within your company. For instance, there are a number of pain points that stop otherwise great companies from getting to where they need to be:

• Poor communication between executive, mid-level, and frontline departments
• Silos that make communication, shared goals, and data difficult or impossible
• Under-empowered employees that can’t effect change at the company

Once your corporate ducks are in a row, and your communication is on point, it’s time to share customer information across departments. And Mailchimp can help you organize that customer data.

In fact, when you use Mailchimp’s Marketing CRM , it’s easy to understand your data and make your marketing budget go further . We have a number of tools to help with these goals, and when you bring all your audience data into Mailchimp, you will start to:

• Get a better sense of who your audience is
• Send the right content to the right people
• Find new ways to talk to people with common traits
• Use your data to find new customers

Understanding the customer

Developing a customer-centric mindset is easier said than done. You need to have an intimate understanding of your customers if you want your business to survive.

Some of the most important aspects of understanding your clients and target market include:

Demographic analysis

First, you need to conduct some market research and ensure you have a detailed breakdown of the demographics of your target market. Some of the most important demographics that you need to collect include:

• How old is your ideal customer?
• How much money do they make?
• Where are they located geographically?
• What are some of the biggest problems they have?

If you can conduct some detailed demographic research on your target market, you will have an easier time developing products and services that address their biggest needs. You can also tailor your marketing campaign to target their pain points and drive interest in the products and services you provide.

Psychographic analysis

Next, you need to collect plenty of psychographic customer data on your potential customers and clients. This refers to the way in which your target customers think and process information.

What is their personality like? What is their mindset like? What is going to help you convince your customers that your business can solve their problems?

There are specialized tools that can help you conduct a psychographic analysis and collect the information you need to maximize the value of your products and services in the eyes of the customer.

Behavioral analysis

You need to capture customer behavior if you want to maximize your conversion rates.

How do your customers interact with your website and customer service representatives? What products and services appear to draw their attention the most?

You need to collect information on customer buying behavior to position your products and services for success.

For example, if you need to influence the behavior of your customers, you may want to consider instituting a customer loyalty program or bundling certain products and services together for a discount. This could help you increase your revenue.

Importance of understanding the customer

The importance of understanding the customer cannot be overstated.

If you want to take care of your customers, it should be intrinsic to your customer service philosophy ; however, actions speak louder than words. You need to take specific steps if you want to endear yourself to your customers and show them that you truly care.

If you collect customer data, you can change your business strategies to match the expectations and needs of your clients. This could help you position your company for success moving forward.

How to align company culture and values

If you want your customer-centric strategy to be at the core of what you do, you need to shift your company toward a customer-centric culture and values to align with those of your customers. Some of the ways you can do this include:

Make the customer a top priority

You might say that you care about the customer, but how can you use actions to show that customer care matters to you?

You can do so by ensuring you have enough customer service representatives to meet the needs of your customers quickly. You can also show customers that you care about them by making your website or store easier to navigate. You can also run customer appreciation specials from time to time, giving discounts to customers who show your loyalty to them.

Furthermore, you need to collect feedback from your customers. Show your customers that their opinions matter and your clients will know that you care about them.

Create a customer-centric culture and mission statement

Brand identity and company culture matter. Much of this is driven by your mission statement. What does your mission statement look like? Does it focus on your company? Or, does it focus on the customer?

There is never a second chance to make a first impression. You need to make that first impression count by showing your customers that they come first. You can do so by including the customer in the mission statement.

Ideally, mention the customer toward the beginning of your mission statement.

Encourage employee engagement and empowerment

The company leadership team might care about the customer, but the customer is going to interact with your staff members and employees more often.

Therefore, you need to have a strong customer experience strategy that focuses on employee engagement and empowerment . Make sure you encourage and incentivize your employees to go out of their way to help your customers.

You might even want to reward employees who receive positive feedback and plaudits from your customers. Make sure you hire employees who are engaged and energetic about helping your customers and reward employees who have positive interactions with your customers.

Incorporate customer feedback to inform decision-making

Do you want to show your customers that you truly care about them? If so, you need to care about their opinions. You need to collect feedback from your customers to let them know that you truly care about what they have to say.

Then, be transparent. Show customers that you have collected certain types of feedback and spotted a trend.

Show your customers how you changed your operations, products, and services to match the feedback you’ve received. This can go a long way toward ensuring the success of your customer-centric company strategy.

Top methods for collecting customer feedback

There are plenty of ways you can collect customer data and feedback. Some of the top methods include:

• Live chat windows with your customer service reps
• Recorded phone calls
• SMS text message surveys
• Email customer service responses and surveys
• Social media messages, such as Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram
• Surveys and messages from the company app

The more portals you can use to collect feedback, the better your strategy will work. You might also want to provide an option for your customers to leave feedback anonymously.

How to implement omnichannel customer service

You need to have a strong customer service strategy that encompasses all aspects of your customers’ needs. This might require multiple touchpoints, and that is why you need to think about omnichannel customer service.

When you implement omnichannel customer service, you incorporate multiple modalities and representatives to comprehensively address the needs of your customers.

You might be able to collect feedback using the channels above, but your agents need to have access to the same information to adequately address the needs of your customers.

Having a strong customer relationship management program that can record the interactions your team has with certain customers will allow your agents to pick up where the previous agent left off. This can help you develop a strong omnichannel customer service strategy.

Empower employees to prioritize the customer experience

Ultimately, your employees are going to be the ones interacting with your customers the most. You need to give them the tools and training necessary to prioritize the customer experience. Some of the ways to do this include:

Train employees on customer-centric practices

You need to train your employees on some of the most important customer-centric company practices. They include:

• Always validate the feelings of the customer when interacting with him or her.
• Follow-through on promises, meaning that employees should not make promises they cannot keep.
• Follow up with customers after an interaction has finished ensuring customer satisfaction.
• Train your employees on basic skills that can diffuse difficult situations and calm down customers who might be angry.

With a customer-centric strategy, your employees will have the ability to ensure the loyalty of your customers.

Encourage customer-focused decision-making

You should also encourage your employees to have a customer-focused mindset. This means employees should focus on providing a positive customer experience before, during, and after the sale.

Employees need to reduce customer wait times, ensure customer transitions are smooth by communicating with one another, record interactions in the CRM system, and treat customers as people instead of numbers. These simple steps can ensure employees focus on the customer with each decision they make, which is an essential component of a customer-centric organization.

Continuously monitor and improve the customer experience

You need to monitor your customer experience by following key metrics, such as your churn rate, Net Promoter Score (NPS), and customer lifetime value (CLV).

Mailchimp provides companies with the tools they need to maximize the customer experience. Take a look at a few of the top tools today, and make sure you develop a customer-centric approach.

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What is customer centricity and why is it important.

16 min read In a post-pandemic consumer landscape, customer centricity is more vital than ever. Learn about why putting customers first is vital for business growth, and how you can create a customer centric culture in your organization.

What is customer centricity?

Customer centricity is the practice of putting customer experience first throughout an organization’s actions and attitude.

Often, it’s seen as a brand culture or mindset shift, but in practice, it is more of a business-wide strategy that requires more than just considering what customers are looking for.

To do more than just keep customers in mind, businesses need to consider customer needs and wants as the most important factor when planning to take any action. From product development to the individual steps in the customer journey , customer centricity should permeate every facet of your business decisions and action.

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Customer centricity vs customer friendliness

Peter Fader, a Wharton marketing professor and author of The Customer Centricity Playbook and Customer Centricity , has suggested that often companies are customer-friendly, but not customer centric. Rather than focusing on individual customers, a brand’s customer base is treated as a whole, with actions applied equally to each customer with expectations of similar outcomes.

Customer centricity, he argues, is about understanding customers on a granular level. Which are the most valuable customers, and what do they want or prefer? Which communication preferences do they have, what experiences do they expect, and what drives them to make the purchases they do?

By focusing on customer centricity rather than being customer friendly, brands can improve their ROI and provide better, more personalized campaigns and tailored customer experiences.

Why is customer centricity important?

Consumers now expect businesses to focus on the customer experience. They want their wants, needs, and opinions to be reflected in their relationship with brands, from customer centric marketing to interactions with customer service reps. In 2022, 63% of consumers told us that brands needed to do a better job of listening to feedback on customer experience. In 2023, we found that 36% of consumers are still not happy with the level of empathy shown in their customer service interactions with brands.

It’s clear taking a customer centric approach is something that customers now expect. But how do you go about creating a customer centric culture, and what are the potential business impacts of taking this action? Read on to find out.

What are the business benefits of being a customer centric company?

Creating a customer centric organization isn’t just about customer benefits. A customer centric business can expect increased customer loyalty and subsequent financial returns, as well as greater competitiveness when it comes to new customer acquisition.

Customers will spend more when they feel heard

When businesses create meaningful experiences that take customer feedback into account, customers feel heard – and are willing to spend more. 62% of consumers said that businesses need to care more about them, and 60% stated they’d be willing to buy more if they did feel cared for . Putting customers at the forefront of your brand actions means customers have better experiences that better reflect what they expect.

Personalization pays dividends

Providing a positive customer experience that is customer centric, rather than generic, is financially rewarding for businesses. Brands that grow more rapidly receive 40% more revenue from a personalized approach than their less successful rivals.

When your brand doesn’t personalize services to customers, it means you risk infuriating your customer base and damaging customer satisfaction – 76% of customers get frustrated when they aren’t given a personalized experience . Personalization and customer centricity is key to keeping loyal customers and attracting new ones.

Customer centric businesses get ahead of their competitors

Research from the Qualtrics XM institute found that the gap in stock prices between customer experience (CX) business leaders and customer experience laggards grew from 24% points in 2019 to 66% points by the end of 2021 . The cost of ignoring customer needs is clear – there is a financial impact when customer centricity isn’t a key business value. Compete with your market rivals by joining the ranks of customer centric companies.

Increased customer loyalty and lifetime value

Customers that can see they are heard and appreciated by businesses are more likely to come back for similar experiences, rather than seeking new ones elsewhere. With the cost of acquisition likely being higher than the cost of customer retention , it makes sense to increase loyalty and customer value by investing in creating better, more customer centric experiences with your brand.

Creating and implementing a customer centric strategy for your organization

When to create and enact a customer centric strategy.

The right time to become a customer centric business is now – the best time was yesterday. However, customer centricity is not just a lip-service action – becoming a customer centric business means enacting change throughout your organization. This requires planning and likely time to ensure that actions taken are worthwhile, both from a financial standpoint and as an enduring change.

How to create a customer centric strategy

To form a better understanding of what you need to do to become a customer centric organization, you’ll need to go through a few key steps.

Gather customer data

Examining your customer data and feedback is the best way to ensure you’re heading in the right direction with your strategy. There’s little use in creating a customer centric approach, only to find it doesn’t meet customer expectations.

Your customer data can be collected from various sources within your organization. These might include:

• Customer survey feedback, such as Net Promoter Score (NPS) responses
• Customer behavior data, such as transaction history
• Front-line feedback from customer service employees
• Website analytics tools
• Social media platforms
• Third party review sites
• Loyalty program data
• Subscriptions to brand marketing, such as newsletters
• Text analysis on call transcripts, chat, SMS, emails and other feedback
• User testing results

Understand your customers through data-led insights

By gathering this information, you can begin to spot patterns and link customer’s feedback in their own words with actions your company has taken. Feeding your customer data into a customer experience platform that can distill data into insights can be a faster way to see the patterns in customer behavior and begin strategizing the action that needs to be taken.

Insights you might pull out include:

• Future predictions of customer needs, based on past behavior trends
• Which channels customers prefer to use, and for which activity (e.g. reaching out to customer service representatives)
• What customer relationship actions will have the best ROI, with the greatest impact from the smallest effort
• How to improve personalization at scale by customer segmentation
• How to retain customers beyond the first purchase and increase customer lifetime value

Develop your strategy and set goals

The data-led insights you develop as part of this process will give you ideas as to where you can make the most impact for the least amount of investment. Once you have a clear view of which actions will have the greatest results, you can develop your strategy and set goals.

For example, if your user testing and customer feedback has indicated that your payment page is confusing, you can reduce the number of drop-offs at that stage in the customer journey by making the page more user-friendly.

Your company actions and goals could be to:

• Ask your web development team to work on user experience
• Ask your marketing team to make it clear that feedback has been taken into account to your customers
• Ask your customer experience team to gather more feedback post-action to see the impact that was made
• Ask your customer service reps to flag payment issues in future
• Review customer data post-action to see if this had a positive impact on sales and revenue, cart abandonment rates and customer calls
• Monitor your KPIs such as customer satisfaction post-action for signs of improvement
• Repeat the process of finding and taking action on customer insights

How to implement your customer centric strategy

Implementing your customer centric strategy is a company-wide process, and one that more companies will adopt as the benefits become clear. Get ahead of the competition by dedicating your brand to implementing a strategy that pays dividends. Here are our suggested actions:

Create a customer centric culture across the entire business

Overall, your business strategy should adhere to a customer centric company vision. This helps to make it clear to everyone within your business that your overall company goal is to put customer satisfaction first in every action taken.

Areas in which you could focus your strategy include:

• Customer centric marketing, with the aim of encouraging customers to become promoters to others through word of mouth
• Customer centric selling, with products and services offered reflecting what customers indicate they need and want
• Customer centric thinking, encouraging suggestions and regular feedback from employees to help improve customer relationships

Build in customer centricity from day one

Your employees are often the best proponents of your customer centric approach, and it makes sense to instill a sense of customer centricity from the very beginning of their work with your brand.

You might try engaging in:

• Customer focused hiring practices, finding employees that also share a customer centric approach to doing their work
• Customer centric personnel development , with customer centricity built into your employee evaluations as a KPI
• More customer focused onboarding practices , with your vision for customer centricity made clear

Common challenges for customer centricity

A lack of leadership buy-in.

Customer centricity starts from the top down. Without leadership buy-in and guidance, brands can often find that customer centricity falls behind other priorities. To avoid this, you’ll need to ensure that management engages with the idea of a customer centric culture, spreading support throughout their teams.

As managers, you’ll need to make it clear that each customer centric action contributes to other business goals by connecting key customer centric objectives with business and organizational KPIs. Customer centricity isn’t a one-off project, after all – it’s an ongoing process that adapts as the market and consumers change. Leadership will need to ensure that initial dedication continues over time.

Organizational silos

When a business’s marketing, sales, operations, customer service function and more work in silos, it can be difficult to share one customer centric vision. Ensuring that vital customer relationship management isn’t one team’s responsibility, but everyone’s, can help to foster customer centricity across the whole business. To help teams to communicate effectively for better customer success, create cross-functional groups across various teams and share insights from customer data widely. Your aim is to create a customer centric brand, rather than just implement customer-focused actions in individual areas.

A product or service focus, rather than a customer centric focus

Working on products or services in isolation from a sales and marketing approach doesn’t reflect real-world customers. For example, take a customer who has purchased two different products with a financial organization such as a bank. They don’t want to have to deal with different teams for each individual product or service they use – they want a unified account overview, with customer service reps aware of all their past interactions with the business.

Moving away from a product or service focus towards customer centricity helps to break down silos, encourages customers to find new products and services from across your brand and helps you to condense operations. It’s a win-win from a customer outcomes and a business point of view.

Inadequate or legacy technology

Bringing customer data together from disparate digital channels is difficult without the right technological support. Inadequate systems that can’t analyze customer data in depth can limit the granular study of customer behavior and drivers that’s needed for a truly customer centric approach. When legacy systems aren’t integrated, important information isn’t delivered cross-team or is kept hidden in silos.

Analysis and the dissemination of vital insights to the right teams at the right time can be greatly supported with the right technology. A customer experience platform, such as Qualtrics Customer XM, can help you to not only gather all relevant customer data, but bring your teams together to work on customer centricity as a whole.

Measuring the success of your customer centric approach

Developing an action plan and goals is only part of creating customer centricity in your organization. You will also need to measure the success you’ve had in meeting your goals. This will help you to make better future decisions, based on successful actions taken over time.

Important customer centric metrics that can be monitored over time could include:

• Net Promoter Score (NPS): How likely is it your existing customers would recommend you to others before and after the strategy has been implemented?
• Customer Satisfaction (CSAT) score: How satisfied are your customers with your products, service and experience?
• Customer Effort Score (CES): How hard is it for your customers to complete actions, and how have your actions impacted this effort?
• Your sales rate: Have sales improved since implementing your actions?
• Your customer lifetime value (CLV): Has customer value increased following your customer centric approach?
• Customer loyalty program signups: How successful has your customer loyalty program been post-strategy?
• Customer support: Have customer support metrics (time to resolution, cost per serve) improved since enacting your strategy?

How to ensure your strategy evolves with customer needs

Customer centric best practices are to continually monitor progress, and evolve with customer needs over time. Becoming a customer centric business is an ongoing process that requires constant review.

Rather than taking a static or regularly-scheduled approach to evaluation, use real-time insights to ensure that your teams are working towards current customers’ expectations. With constant monitoring, business-wide KPIs and an adaptive strategy, you can ensure that your brand is always evolving to meet customer needs.

This also helps you to meet new customers’ expectations. By consistently analyzing and predicting behavior based on loyal customer trends, you can replicate successful actions for new customers and develop quicker steps to customer retention.

Creating customer centric experience with Qualtrics

Developing customer centric thinking across your organization and understanding how your actions make an impact doesn’t have to be difficult.

With the Qualtrics Customer XM platform, you can tailor each customer’s experience at scale. Hear all customer feedback, no matter where it’s shared. Use powerful analytics and predictive intelligence to collect vital data and transform it into targeted action for better business outcomes.

Related resources

Customer data platforms 14 min read, customer experience insights 12 min read, customer relationship building 12 min read, customer profiles 11 min read, ai & customer experience 13 min read, customer experience transformation 15 min read, customer lifecycle management 19 min read, request demo.

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CMR INSIGHTS

What is customer-centricity, and why does it matter.

by Jonathan Hughes, David Chapnick, Isaac Block, and Saptak Ray

Image Credit | UX Indonesia

Customer-centricity has become a hot topic, and our recent survey of 250 individuals at 180 B2B companies demonstrates why. Over the past five years, companies reporting a “very mature” level of customer-centricity experienced 2.5X revenue growth compared with those reporting their company was “very immature.” Previous research from Forrester similarly showed that market leaders in customer experience enjoyed ~450% greater CAGR, compared to market laggards, during the period of 2010-2015. 

Related CMR Articles

“A Better Way to Manage Customer Experience: Lessons from the Royal Bank of Scotland” by Stan Maklan, Paolo Antonetti, & Steve Whitty

“Customer-Centric Leadership: How to Manage Strategic Customers as Assets in B2B Markets” by Christoph Senn, Axel Thoma, & George S. Yip

“Blurring the Lines between Physical and Digital Spaces: Business Model Innovation in Retailing” by Milan Jocevski

Despite the buzz, there is a great deal of confusion about what customer-centricity is and how to put its principles into practice. At too many companies it is mostly hype — a rebranding of traditional marketing, sales, and customer service that involves no fundamental change and delivers little benefit. Genuine customer-centricity requires transforming all enterprise functions that affect customers, breaking down the silos between those functions, and building a culture that rewards behaviors aligned with customer success.

To help companies assess their efforts and guide their investment and transformation, we have developed a model (Figure 1 below) that defines four distinct levels of customer-centricity. Based on our research and extensive work with clients on customer-centricity initiatives, a majority of companies function at levels two or three. Only about 9% of companies operate in a truly customer-centric manner, with manufacturers (5%) at the low end and high-tech companies (19%) at the high end, on average. These numbers indicate an attractive opportunity for companies to differentiate themselves by enhancing the way they engage with and deliver value to their customers.

Here is what market leaders do to put the customer at the center of their business.

1. Embed customer-centric thinking and practices in company DNA — across all functions

R&D organizations are staffed by bright, innovative people, but they are usually far removed from customers, and often more energized by new technology and solving technical problems than meeting customer needs.

Product management teams are closer to customers than R&D, but their view of customers is aggregated by market segment, not individualized. They are measured and rewarded based on the sales and profitability of their products – and thus see customers primarily through the lens of those products. That’s not necessarily inconsistent with a focus on customer value, but it is certainly not the same thing. As customer needs evolve and change, the incentives of the product management function often create inertia that impedes innovation and responsiveness to customers

Marketing and sales teams use voice-of-customer surveys and interviews, customer focus groups, customer journey analysis, and various market research techniques to seek out information about what customers want. At the same time, incentives based on sales growth and account profitability often compromise a truly customer-centric focus, when they are not balanced by a deep commitment to delivering value to customers and enabling their success.

Wholesale change in how these functions operate is neither realistic nor necessary, nor even desirable. Completely replacing sales quotas with incentives based solely on customer satisfaction or success is, in most cases, a good way to drive your company out of business. Attempting to turn researchers, developers, designers, and engineers into salespeople or customer service professionals would be likewise misguided.

Nonetheless, the silos that exist in most companies between functions need to be breached. Functions from R&D, to Product Management, to Marketing, to Sales, need to expand their traditional priorities and measures of success with unifying metrics focused on customer value and success.

Too often, noncustomer-facing personnel feel disconnected from, and unaccountable for, customer outcomes. This leads to decisions and priority-setting focused on the needs of suppliers, not customers. Companies should implement policies that help employees (including those who do not touch the customer directly) understand how their work contributes not only to the delivery of specific products and solutions but to the customer’s overall business strategy.

Product designers and managers should regularly join account teams in customer meetings. Sales leaders and managers should be actively involved in the earliest stages of R&D and new product development. In practice, this often leads to a significant amount of debate and argument. R&D teams often dismiss salespeople as technically ignorant; sales teams view R&D as overly theoretical and detached from marketplace realities. But customer-centric leadership can ensure that such clashes do not lead to dysfunctional conflict, but rather serve as a source of creative abrasion that drives practical innovation.

2. Seek competitive differentiation through every aspect of the customer journey and experience

By now, most companies have embraced the practice of mapping customer journeys. According to Salesforce, 56% of companies with 2,500+ employees have adopted a “customer journey strategy” — but just 29% rate their strategies as “very effective” or “effective.”

Market leaders distinguish themselves in two ways. First, unlike many companies that manage solution implementation, service delivery, and customer service as cost centers, leaders treat them as value drivers. Rather than focus primarily on the internal efficiency of these functions, they relentlessly search for ways to improve the customer experience across every touch point.  They are willing to add internal costs when doing so will reduce complexity for customers, accelerate time to revenue, and increase customer retention and cross-selling opportunities. Customer service and support teams at customer-centric companies probe for opportunities to deliver unexpected value — versus simply solving the immediate problem. (Note that this is quite different from the common, and often counter-productive, practice of mandating that customer-service reps engage in direct cross-selling or upselling.) Such an approach requires close partnership between Sales leaders, and leaders in Operations who are responsible for many of the systems and resources that shape a customer’s experience.

Second, market leaders also balance investment in automation with continued focus on human interactions with customers. While customer journeys are becoming more automated, 75% of global consumers still want to interact with human counterparts. Why? Even as customers appreciate the ability to quickly select from a catalogue of online offerings, or self-configure a solution, when they have complex or unique needs, customers prefer to deal with a knowledgeable, consultative sales team. Self-service tools are spreading as they become more powerful, but human judgment, ingenuity, and — when things go wrong, empathy — cannot be replaced. Best-in-class companies understand the interdependence between systems and people, and optimize the customer experience by making complementary improvements to both, and by ensuring their seamless integration.

3. Externalize innovation

Research and development at most companies are inwardly focused, but market leaders realize that successful innovation requires deep customer empathy. Consider GE Healthcare IT, which made a point of visiting hospitals to understand how they (and their patients) experienced GE equipment. After noticing that children would often cry when they saw MRI machines, GE reps decided to visualize the rooms as children would, even kneeling to be at a child’s height. They ended up helping hospitals transform MRI rooms into adventure experiences, such as a pirate ship — and patient satisfaction scores increased by 90 percent.

Joint innovation centers, where technical staff from a company collaborate closely with technical staff from top customers or suppliers, are also a powerful practice. Innovation labs, embraced by companies across industries (e.g., Amazon, Huawei, FICO), give customers the opportunity to work closely with dedicated cross-functional teams of technology and solution development experts.

Even if, as Apple co-founder Steve Jobs famously remarked, customers themselves do not yet realize they have a need, R&D teams should be trained in customer-centric thinking — they should embrace collaboration and co-innovation with customers and partners as a key component of solution development and demonstrate how new products and features will meet real and pressing customer needs.

4. Reorient sales – from selling to customers to selling for customers

Traditional sales approaches focus on educating customers about the features and benefits of a company’s products, and then explaining why they are superior to competing offerings. Consultative selling, and a focus on becoming a trusted advisor to customers, represent attempts to go beyond a transactional “push” model of selling to something that is more collaborative, and that ideally leads to better outcomes for both customers and suppliers.

But a truly customer-centric approach to selling requires something more radical. The goal of customer-centric selling is not to close a sale. It is to help the customer make the best decision – for them . This does not mean salespeople should not educate customers on their company’s solutions and the value they can add to their customers – that is the essential role salespeople play in helping customers make informed decisions. But customer-centric selling does entail a paradigm shift, one that calls for new ways of talking about, and measuring, success and failure. 

Customer-centric sales organizations do not focus primarily on sales “wins” or “losses.” Closing the sale of a product or solution that is not the ideal fit for customer’s needs is a Pyrrhic victory that comes at the expense of trust and future sales opportunities. Conversely, working with a customer all the way to the point of disengagement without a sale, and perhaps even advising that customer that your solution does not appear to be the best fit for them, is no loss. It is an investment in a relationship that maximizes opportunities for future sales.

For an extreme case of what happens when sales practices and incentives become untethered from a focus on what is best for the customer, consider Wells Fargo. Between 2002 and 2016, a hyper-aggressive pursuit of sales devolved into outright fraud, resulting in $3B in fines, the resignation and lifetime ban from banking of the CEO John Stumpf, and sanctions by the Federal Reserve. Contrast that with Zappos, where if a customer calls for a product and Zappos does not have the product in stock, staff recommend a competitor who has it.

  5. Marry customer-centricity with employee engagement

As with many business disciplines, customer-centricity is about more than systems and tools. At root, it is about cultural transformation, and successful execution ultimately depends on people. The simple truth is that you cannot expect employees to treat customers better than they themselves are treated.

Market leaders in customer-centricity ensure the entire company keeps customers and their needs at the forefront of planning, decision making, and day-to-day execution. (Figure 2 shows how this differs from traditional practices.) Three key practices enable them to do so.

• Inspire and engage employees. Improving employee engagement creates a virtuous cycle: Top talent seeks to work for companies that delight customers, and attracting and retaining the best talent leads to better customer outcomes. 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 organization, is to invest in customer-focused training and development. Bank of America and Carilion Clinic, for example, have expanded training curriculums that were traditionally focused on technical skills to include customer empathy and engaging in difficult conversations with customers.
• 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 organizations. 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.
• 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.

Figure 2: Transforming a company’s value chain for customer-centricity

Years ago, David Packard of Hewlett-Packard observed that “marketing is too important to be left to the marketing people.” In today’s hyper-competitive economy, customer relationships are too important to be left to sales teams and customer-service organizations. 

Building a customer-centric enterprise requires a commitment to delighting customers that cuts across functions and departments. Intuit launched its Design for Delight initiative in 2014 by encouraging its employees to “fall in love with” its customers’ problems. Since launching this program, based on deep customer empathy and rapid innovation with customers, Intuit’s stock price has risen more than 450 percent.

How many of your company’s customers work with you primarily because they lack a better current alternative — because they feel like they have to, not because they want to? The answer to that question is likely to determine your company’s future.

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9 Strategies to Build a Customer-Centric Business: Real-World Examples

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Customer-Centric Brands are Gaining 60% more profits because of their relentless focus on creating amazing CX.

A customer-centric company focuses on meeting the needs and surpassing the expectations of customers, to build lasting relationships and loyalty.

In this article, we will explore what is a customer-centric company, examples, 9 customer-centric strategy best practices, the importance of a customer-focus company, how to build customer-centric company culture as well as relational and transactional service models in a customer-centric company.

Key Takeaway :

A customer-centric company is an organization that places its customers at the root of its business plan, aiming to provide a favourable customer experience and meet the expectations of its customers throughout the entire journey. To build a customer-centric company, businesses should focus on deep understanding of customers, putting customers at the center, personalization and customization, effective communication channels, employee training and empowerment, continuous feedback loop, proactive customer support, loyalty and rewards programs, and measuring and analyzing metrics.

What is a Customer-Centric Company?

A customer-centric company is an organization that places its customers at the root of its business plan. The main aim of a customer-centric company is to provide a favourable customer experience and meet the expectations of its customers throughout the entire journey.

This customer-focused strategy not only fosters loyalty and satisfaction but also enhances overall business success and competitiveness in the market.

9 Best Practises: Customer-Centric Strategies

Creating a customer-centric strategy is essential for businesses aiming to build strong customer relationships and foster long-term success.

Here are some best practices to develop an effective customer-centric company:

1. Deep Understanding of Customers

Begin by gaining a profound understanding of your target customers. Conduct market research, analyze demographics, and actively listen to customer feedback to identify their needs, preferences, and pain points.

2. Put Customers at the Center

Place the customer at the centre of all decision-making processes, from product development to marketing strategies. Ensure that every aspect of your business aligns with meeting customer expectations.

3. Personalization and Customization

Tailor your products, services, and interactions to suit individual customer preferences. Embrace personalization techniques to create unique and memorable experiences for each customer.

4. Effective Communication Channels

Offer multiple communication channels to make it easy for customers to reach out and interact with your brand. Promptly respond to inquiries and provide proactive updates when necessary.

5. Employee Training and Empowerment

Invest in comprehensive training programs for employees, focusing on customer service skills, empathy, and problem-solving. Empower your team to make decisions that prioritize customer satisfaction.

6. Continuous Feedback Loop

Establish a robust feedback mechanism to collect customer insights regularly. Actively use customer feedback to improve products, services, and overall customer experience.

7. Proactive Customer Support

Anticipate customer needs and address potential issues before they escalate. Offer proactive support through informative content, self-service options, and timely assistance.

8. Loyalty and Rewards Programs

Implement Customer loyalty programs to reward and recognize loyal customers. Offer exclusive perks, discounts, or personalized offers to enhance customer retention .

9. Measure and Analyze Metrics

Define key performance indicators (KPIs) to measure the success of your customer-centric strategy. Analyze data regularly to track progress and identify areas for improvement.

Read More: How to Build Customer Loyalty and Trust in 2024?

Examples: Customer-Centric Comapanies

Several companies have successfully implemented customer-centric strategies and achieved remarkable results.

Amazon is known for its relentless focus on customer satisfaction.

Amazon’s obsession with delivering a seamless online shopping experience, fast delivery, and exceptional customer service has made it an e-commerce industry leader.

Their commitment to a customer-centric company is evident through the customer reviews and ratings system.

They value customer feedback, which helps others make informed purchasing decisions.

Amazon’s personalized recommendations feature uses advanced algorithms, enhancing the customer experience based on browsing and purchase history.

Another example of a customer-centric company is Zappos, a renowned online shoe retailer.

Zappos has built a reputation for its customer-centric culture, going above and beyond to deliver unparalleled customer service.

Their reputation is built on delivering unparalleled customer service, going above and beyond to win customer hearts.

Zappos understands that trust and exceptional experiences foster customer loyalty.

They prioritize creating positive emotional connections through personalized interactions and delightful surprises.

Hilton Hotels & Resorts

Hilton Hotels & Resorts is an exemplary customer-centric company that has established itself as a beacon of hospitality in the hotel industry.

Hilton, a leading hospitality brand, deeply commits to customer satisfaction.

They craft a guest experience that revolves around understanding and catering to unique needs and preferences.

By actively listening to customer feedback, Hilton implements improvements to enhance the overall guest experience.

Through online reviews, surveys, and direct communication, they consistently seek insights to exceed expectations.

Examples like Amazon, Zappos, and Hilton Hotels and Resorts demonstrate the tangible benefits of prioritizing the customer experience, making them leaders in their respective industries.

Why Company Need to Be Customer-Centric?

A Customer-centric is essential for a business to achieve sustainable success and growth. It aims to deliver customer satisfaction and understand what their customer needs.

Let’s know the reasons for a company to be customer-centric to make the customer experience better. 

• Developing a customer-centric company starts with understanding customer orientation.
• It involves putting the customer at the centre of all decision-making processes, from product development to customer service.
• Prioritizing customer needs enhances satisfaction, loyalty, and revenue.
• Customer focus goes beyond good service; it requires understanding and anticipating customer needs.
• Gaining insights into customer desires, pain points, and motivations is crucial.
• Understanding customer needs is the foundation for a customer-centric strategy.

Example: A skincare company conducts market research to discover customer preferences for natural, cruelty-free, and sustainable products, aligning their offerings accordingly.

How to Build a Customer-Centric Company Culture?

One of the ways of implementing the customer-centric company culture is to foster it, but how can you do that? It is simple!

• Fostering Empathy: Key to Customer-Oriented Culture
• Going Above and Beyond The Power of Exceptional Follow-Up
• Hiring and Training for Customer-Oriented Success
• Streamlining the Customer Experience: Don’t Put the Burden on Them
• Setting Standards: A Foundation for Customer Orientation
• Achieving Company-Wide Alignment: The Key to Success
• Knowing Your Customers: What Truly Matters to Them

Recommended Article: 3 Customer Success Plan Templates and Implementation in Business

Relational vs Transactional Service Model

The Relational vs. Transactional Service Model is a concept used in customer-centric companies to differentiate between two approaches to customer service and engagement.

Both models have different focuses and objectives, but they can complement each other in providing a holistic customer experience.

Key Characteristics of Relational Service Model

The relational service model aims to retain customers and companies use this model to prioritize customer needs. The below characteristics will help you in delivering adaptable solutions.

Personalization:

• Collect and use customer data for personalization.
• Offer personalized recommendations and solutions.

Customer Engagement

• Engage with customers beyond transactions.
• Personalized emails, follow-up calls, and social media interactions.

Proactive Support

• Anticipate customer needs and assist.
• Proactively reach out to help before customers ask.

Long-term Focus

• Aim to retain customers for loyalty and repeat business.

Example: A software company using the Relational Service Model might assign dedicated account managers to each client. These managers understand the client’s unique requirements and regularly check in to provide ongoing support, updates, and customized solutions.

Key characteristics of  Transactional Service Model

The purpose of the transactional model is to deliver efficient and satisfying services that serve the immediate needs of customers. The following characteristics will help your business in emphasizing quick and effective resolution.

• Handle interactions quickly and effectively.
• Optimize processes for speed and accuracy.

Standardization

• Use standardized responses and processes.
• Resolve immediate concerns or issues.

Issue Resolution

• Focus on resolving immediate customer issues.

Short-term Focus

• Prioritize immediate transactions and needs.
• Less emphasis on building long-term relationships.

Example: A retail store using the Transactional Service Model ensures that customers have a smooth checkout process, with well-trained cashiers who can efficiently handle transactions and answer common questions about products.

What’s Your Take on Customer-Centric Company?

Customer-centric brands like Amazon, Zappos, and Hilton Hotels & Resorts are excelling due to their unwavering focus on creating exceptional customer experiences. Putting customers at the root of their strategies has led to incredible rewards, including increased profitability and determined customer loyalty.

Embracing these customer-centric company approaches can help businesses thrive as leaders in their respective industries.

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The Customer-Centric Business Model Explained

Entrepreneurs and business owners all understand how important customer service is to the life of their businesses. When customers are happy, businesses tend to enjoy numerous benefits. For example, according to Salesforce research, 89% of consumers are more likely to make another purchase after a positive customer service experience.

It is no wonder that more and more businesses are reinvesting their resources into better understanding and serving their customers to keep them satisfied. However, some businesses take this customer satisfaction to another level. More businesses are choosing to put the focus on the customer first in order to help their businesses thrive.

Businesses that adopt this strategy are utilizing a customer-centric business model. But what is this model and how does it work? In this article, we will break down this model, look at some examples, and also discuss some advantages and disadvantages.

What is the Customer-Centric Model

The customer-centric business model is a strategic approach where a company’s primary focus is on providing a positive experience for its customers. It is also sometimes called the customer-focused model. This business model places the customer at the core of every decision-making process. Both business-to-consumer (B2C) and business-to-business (B2B) companies have used this model to attract and keep customers. From product design to marketing strategies this unique business model relies on understanding and responding to customer needs and preferences.

Unlike traditional business models that prioritize product development or sales targets, the customer-centric approach seeks to create a long-term relationship with the customer. The goal is to foster loyalty and repeat business.

It involves integrating customer feedback into the business process. With that feedback, the business can now tailor services or products to meet customer expectations. Businesses adopting this model often leverage data analytics to gain deeper insights into customer behavior and preferences. This model is grounded in the belief that satisfied customers are more likely to return, refer others, and contribute to sustainable business growth.

Examples of the Customer-Centric Model

Many renowned companies have successfully implemented the customer-centric model. They constantly collect and analyze customer data to improve their shopping experience. One example is Apple. This company which is valued at over a trillion dollars has mastered the art of creating a loyal customer base. They have been able to do this by offering a unique ecosystem that caters to various customer needs.

Another example of the customer-centric model is the shoe and clothing e-commerce leader Zappos. The retailer is known for its exceptional customer service. This includes an unreal 365-day return policy. They are also known for a customer service team that goes above and beyond to ensure customer satisfaction.

However, one of the best examples of a customer-centric model business is Amazon. The retail giant has taken the customer-focused model to another level. They created a leadership principle that revolves around the customer first. Amazon Leadership Principle #1 is to be customer-obsessed. They describe it as the following:

“Leaders start with the customer and work backwards. They work vigorously to earn and keep customer trust. Although leaders pay attention to competitors, they obsess over customers.”-Amazon Leadership Principle #1

With this principle, Amazon employees are expected to examine their actions to make sure they are serving the customers.

Amazon’s employees are encouraged to:

• Ask, “Is what I’m working on helping my customers?”
• Rigorously pursue customer feedback
•  Ask themselves, “What would my customer want?”
• Ask, “What will make them happy and what will satisfy their needs?”
• Seek to impress the customer

Amazon’s founder and former CEO Jeff Bezos once said, “There are many ways to center a business. You can be competitor-focused, you can be product-focused, you can be technology-focused, you can be business model-focused, and there are more. But in my view, obsessive customer focus is by far the most protective of day one vitality.”

This focus has made Amazon the world’s second-largest retailer and the world’s largest online retailer. Let’s take a look at some advantages of businesses adopting this customer-centric model and mindset.

Also read: Amazon’s Business Model: 4 Ways Amazon Makes Money and How Much It Makes?

Advantages of the Customer-Centric Model

Enhanced customer satisfaction and loyalty.

One of the primary advantages of the customer-centric model is the enhancement of customer satisfaction and loyalty. In this approach, businesses prioritize understanding and meeting the needs and expectations of their customers.

By focusing on what customers really value, companies can deliver more personalized and effective products or services. This heightened level of satisfaction fosters stronger customer loyalty. As most business owners understand, loyal customers are more likely to remain customers. For many businesses, keeping customers should be a top priority. One survey found that 73% of consumers will switch to a competitor after multiple bad experiences.

Also, satisfied customers often become brand ambassadors. As a result, these customers are more likely to recommend products or services to friends and family. These recommendations can lead to an increase in new customer acquisitions through word-of-mouth referrals. These referrals can save a business money on advertising as customers are advertising for them.

Considering that only 33% of customers trust traditional marketing, these referrals can be a valuable long-term source of new customers if handled correctly.

Improved Responsiveness to Market Changes

Another advantage of this model is how it helps a business become more responsive to the market. Using this model, businesses can maintain a close relationship with their customers. With this relationship, they can constantly gather valuable feedback. Knowing what their customers want and what they think can help them quickly identify shifts in consumer preferences and trends.

This agility enables businesses to adapt their offerings in a timely manner. Ultimately, being able to adapt quickly will help the business stay relevant and competitive.

Higher Chances of Sales

According to one survey, small e-commerce businesses generate 35% of their revenue from the top 5% of loyal, repeat customers. Businesses using the customer-centric model can expect the number of loyal customers to increase. As a result, the business creates the opportunity for increased conversion and increased sales because of the number of loyal customers.

Also, the chances of increasing sales are helped by customer referrals. Earlier, we explained how referrals are increased because of enhanced customer service. However, the benefits don’t seem to stop there as those referrals are also more likely to lead to sales. A Nielsen study found that consumers were 77% more likely to buy a product if their friends recommended it.

Competitive Differentiation

Finally, the customer-centric model provides a powerful means of competitive differentiation. In industries, products and services are often similar. Because of this, offering a superior customer experience can be a key differentiator. This approach can enhance the entire customer journey. A customer-focused approach during pre-sales, sales, and after-sales stages can make customers feel more valued.

By excelling in customer experience, companies can stand out from their competitors. As we mentioned earlier, being different can help attract new customers as well as keep current customers loyal. Today, customers have a plethora of choices. As a result, a strong focus on customer-centricity can be a decisive factor in winning and maintaining market share.

Disadvantages of the Customer-Centric Model

Resource intensiveness and high costs.

One of the primary disadvantages of the customer-centric model is its resource intensiveness and associated high costs. Implementing a truly customer-centric approach is a lot of work. Oftentimes, doing so requires significant investment. This means investing in customer service, technology, training, and data analysis tools. Needless to say, this can be particularly challenging for small or medium-sized businesses with limited budgets.

Also, maintaining a high level of customer service across various platforms and touchpoints involves ongoing expenses. For example, training staff, upgrading technology and gathering and analyzing customer feedback. These costs can strain financial resources. This is especially true if the return on investment in terms of increased customer loyalty or revenue is not immediate or is lower than expected.

Risk of Over-Reliance on Customer Feedback

Another challenge of the customer-centric model is the potential over-reliance on customer feedback. Well, all know that customer insights are invaluable for tailoring products and services. However, exclusively relying on customer feedback can sometimes lead businesses to make decisions that may not align with their long-term strategy or brand identity.

Customers typically provide feedback based on their current needs and experiences. As a result, their feedback may not necessarily take into account future market trends or technological advancements. This could cause a business to become too reactive. The business could begin constantly tweaking its offerings to meet every piece of feedback. If this happens, the business could end up lacking clear direction or focus.

Potential Dilution of Brand Identity

Brand identity should be a goal of every business. However, excessive focus on customer satisfaction can sometimes lead to a dilution of brand identity. In efforts to meet varied and sometimes conflicting customer expectations, businesses may find themselves straying from their core values and brand proposition.

If a brand is trying to position itself as a niche company that sells premium products, creating too many lower-priced products to meet customer’s expectations can confuse the company’s target market.

This can confuse customers and erode the unique selling points that originally attracted them to the brand. Additionally, trying to cater to a wide range of customer preferences might result in a loss of uniqueness in the product or service. Ironically, this would make it difficult for businesses to differentiate themselves in a crowded market which is one of the advantages of being customer-centric.

Balancing Diverse Customer Needs

Finally, the customer-centric model poses the challenge of balancing the needs and wants of different customer segments. Not all customers will have the same preferences or expectations. What delights one customer might not satisfy another.

This can make it challenging for businesses to prioritize which feedback to act on. Also, it will make it harder for the business to decide which products to develop and which to discontinue.

In trying to please everyone, there is a risk of not fully satisfying any particular group. This could lead to a decline in overall customer satisfaction and loyalty. Additionally, catering to the specific needs of different segments may require additional resources and can complicate business operations.

As we stated earlier, customer service is crucial. We also showed some of the advantages of being customer-focused. However, there are some downsides to adopting a customer-centric model. For some businesses, they simply do not have the resources to be customer-centric while growing revenue and profits. Entrepreneurs and business owners wanting to utilize this model need to understand the risks and the amount of effort and focus it will take to execute properly.

Also read: 

21 different types of business models with examples.

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Tom is a member of the Editorial Team at StartUp Mindset. He has over 6 years of experience with writing on business, entrepreneurship, and other topics. He mainly focuses on online businesses, digital publishing, marketing and eCommerce startups.

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How to Craft a Successful Customer-Centric Marketing Strategy

Updated: September 23, 2022

Published: March 16, 2022

When was the last time a business fully addressed your wants and needs as a customer? For me, it was around the holidays, while searching for the perfect gift to give a friend who is a huge fan of the video game series "The Legend of Zelda."

My online search for the right gift led me to STL Ocarina , a company that sells ocarinas — the musical wind instruments that have been around for thousands of years and a staple item in the Legend of Zelda series. Clearly, the company knew many of its customers were like me — either fans of the games or shopping for fans of the games — so it made finding Zelda-themed ocarinas on its website simple.

Just hover over the tab that says "Our Ocarinas," and the first category to pop up under the tab says "For Legend of Zelda Fans." From there, I was taken to a page displaying their Zelda-themed ocarinas and the option to include a songbook of the game’s music.

After purchasing the ocarina and songbook, I remembered my friend doesn’t know how to play the ocarina and the songbook may not have tips for beginners. Luckily, STL Ocarina’s confirmation email included a YouTube instructional video and links to online resources that will help him get started.

STL Ocarina serves as a great example of what customer-centric marketing looks like. During the few minutes I was on the company’s website, every touchpoint of my buyer journey was valuable, from landing on the website to browsing for the right gift to making a purchase.

Months later, I’m still recommending the website to friends who want Legend of Zelda merchandise or are simply looking for a new hobby to pick up.

In order for your company to turn customers into advocates, the same way I advocate for STL Ocarina, it’s important to add value to every part of the customer’s journey and to address their needs. A way to accomplish this is to create a solid customer-centric marketing strategy.

What is customer-centric marketing?

Customer-centric marketing is the practice of prioritizing the customers’ needs and interests in every interaction with your business, such as delivery, promotion, advertising, and more.

Customer-centric marketing ensures your customers are satisfied with their products or service enough to remain loyal and to tell others to become customers as well. To implement customer-centric marketing for your business, first ask yourself:

• How are customers connecting with your business? Is it via social media, the website, email, phone, or something else?
• Is there value being offered in each of these channels?
• What can be done to improve the customer’s experience at every touchpoint?

Customer-Centric Marketing Examples

Many companies have taken a customer-centric approach to their marketing strategy and have achieved great success. These companies include:

1. Starbucks

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One of the most well-known successful customer-centric marketing strategies comes from Starbucks with its Starbucks Reward Loyalty Program. This program offers a variety of perks, including exclusive discounts, free refills on brewed coffee, and free drinks for customers on their birthday. However, one of the program’s standout services is that it gives customers the ability to order and pay ahead of arriving at the restaurant.

This means customers who are pressed for time can schedule their items for pickup, thus avoiding long lines and inconsistent wait times.

According to Forbes , Starbucks attributed 40% of its total sales in 2019 to its rewards program. Forbes also reported users of the Loyalty Program’s app were 5.6 times more likely to visit a Starbucks every day.

2. Nordstrom

Luxury department store chain Nordstrom sought to improve its service and product discovery by creating a more streamlined and personalized shopping experience. The company achieved this by implementing its Nordstrom Analytical Platform . The platform consists of AI models that handle tasks such as inventory control and fulfillment, and routes orders to the nearest store.

The company also created fashion maps in which the AI uses natural language conversations, combined with images and information gathered from social media to predict customer preferences. Thanks to AI, the Nordstrom Analytical Platform offers personalized products and selections for customers via its Looks feature, storyboards, and more.

Back in 2019, Bacardi wanted to get potential customers in the UK and Germany excited about the brand’s new single-malt whiskies. Understanding drinkers in that demographic often have a taste for luxury, Bacardi teamed up with Amazon to create a live whisky tasting customers can enjoy from the comfort of their home.

The spirits company created its Single Malt Discovery Collection, which was made up of three whiskies exclusively for tasting. Customers in the UK and Germany could purchase the collection from Amazon and, in turn, receive access to the live streamed tasting. During the live stream, customers were able to ask questions to the host via a custom landing page on Amazon. More than 500 questions were asked and Bacardi saw an increase in sales on Amazon .

Tips for Creating a Strong Customer Centric Marketing Strategy

Crafting a customer-centric marketing strategy for the first time can be daunting, but it doesn’t have to be. Here’s how to get started:

1. Get Leadership Involved

To help ensure the success of any new strategy, it’s important to get the support and enthusiasm of senior leadership. If senior leaders prioritize customers at every channel and interaction, it will encourage others in the organization to do the same. You can get leadership on board by hosting regularly scheduled meetings to educate leadership on customer-centric marketing, discuss upcoming campaigns, and brainstorm creative ways to promote the brand.

2. Learn About Your Customers

Gain a better understanding of your customers by doing some of the following:

• Conduct surveys asking customers about the quality of the service/product, the company’s strong points, where it can improve, and how they most interact with the brand.
• Have one-on-one interviews with current and former customers asking about their experience with the company, why they choose to remain loyal, or why they left. You can also ask former customers what changes would have made them stay.
• Use data gathered from analytics tools to track customer behavior.
• Monitor social media and/or enable Google Alerts so that you can see what people are saying about your business online. For example, if customers often take to Twitter to complain about how difficult it is to navigate your website, that could be a sign to update the site. You can also gauge the type of content your customers like to see on social media. Perhaps on TikTok you notice followers enjoy behind-the-scenes videos, while customers on Twitter enjoy having their questions answered or reading important announcements.
• Read through customer emails and monitor calls to see how customers are interacting with your company.

3. Add Value to Every Customer Interaction

Customers, or potential customers, can be at any stage of their journey with your company, which is why it’s important to create appeal at every touchpoint. Whether they interact with your organization via social media, are calling to get help with a problem, or they are at the end stage of purchasing a product/service, every part of the buyer’s cycle should spark engagement and joy.

Nordstrom offering personalized products/services based on the customer’s behavior, and Starbucks creating a system that allows customers to get their needs met quickly and efficiently are great examples of adding value at different customer interactions. Same can be said for Bacardi’s virtual, at-home whisky tasting. The one thing that all of these actions have in common is that they make the customer experience fun, engaging, and simple.

The Value of Customer-Centric Marketing

As technology continues to change the way people interact with brands and businesses, the customer journey has become less linear. To keep up with the ever-evolving journey, companies must adopt a customer centric marketing approach to build stronger relationships that will turn your customers into some of its strongest advocates.

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How To Write a Business Plan for Customer-Centric in 9 Steps: Checklist

By alex ryzhkov, resources on customer-centric.

• Financial Model
• Business Plan
• Value Proposition
• One-Page Business Plan
• SWOT Analysis
• Business Model
• Marketing Plan

The personalized service model is quickly becoming the go-to business model in the US, with industries such as high-end fashion, luxury goods, and high-end real estate embracing this customer-centric approach. This business model puts the customer at the center, providing them with tailored experiences and exclusive attention.

According to recent statistics, the demand for personalized service is on the rise. In fact, a survey conducted by XYZ Research Company found that 85% of consumers are willing to pay more for a personalized experience . This not only emphasizes the popularity of the personalized service model but also highlights the potential for businesses to tap into this growing market.

In order to successfully implement a customer-centric business plan, it is essential to follow a step-by-step process. This checklist will guide you through the key steps to creating a business plan that puts your customers front and center.

Researching the target market and identifying customer needs is the first step to understanding your customers. By conducting a competitive analysis, you can identify opportunities to differentiate yourself and develop a strong value proposition. Creating a customer segmentation strategy allows you to tailor your offerings to different customer groups, while a customer journey map helps you visualize the customer experience and identify areas for improvement.

Once you have a clear understanding of your customers, it's important to determine your marketing and sales approach to effectively reach and engage your target audience. Forecasting expected revenue and expenses helps you set realistic goals and allocate resources accordingly, while establishing the required resources and infrastructure ensures you have the necessary tools to deliver personalized experiences.

Lastly, it's crucial to identify potential risks and develop a risk management plan to mitigate any potential setbacks. By following these nine steps, you can create a comprehensive business plan that prioritizes the needs and preferences of your customers, setting your business up for success in the customer-centric landscape.

Keep an eye out for our upcoming blog posts, where we will delve deeper into each step and provide actionable tips to help you implement a successful customer-centric business plan.

Research The Target Market And Identify Customer Needs.

Before developing a business plan for a customer-centric model, it is crucial to thoroughly research the target market and identify the specific needs of your customers. This step will lay the foundation for creating a tailored experience that will resonate with your target audience.

Start by conducting market research to gain a deep understanding of the industry trends, customer preferences, and purchasing behaviors. This research can be done through surveys, interviews, and analyzing existing data.

Once you have a clear understanding of the market, narrow down your focus to identify your ideal customer. Define the demographics, psychographics, and buying patterns of your target audience. This will help you identify the unique needs and preferences of your customers.

Here are a few tips for researching the target market and identifying customer needs:

• Use online tools and resources to gather data about your target audience.
• Reach out to existing customers or conduct focus groups to gather firsthand insights.
• Stay updated on industry trends and changes in customer behavior.
• Utilize social media platforms and online forums to gather feedback and engage with your target audience.

By conducting thorough research and identifying customer needs, you will be able to tailor your business plan to create a customer-centric model that meets the demands of your target market. This step is essential in ensuring that your business is aligned with your customers' expectations, ultimately leading to their satisfaction and loyalty.

Conduct A Competitive Analysis.

Conducting a competitive analysis is an essential step in creating a customer-centric business plan. This analysis allows you to gain insight into your competitors' strategies, strengths, and weaknesses, enabling you to position your business effectively in the market.

Here are some important points to consider when conducting a competitive analysis:

• Identify your direct competitors: It is crucial to identify the businesses that directly compete with yours in terms of products, services, and target market. This will help you understand the competitive landscape and assess the level of competition you will face.
• Analyze their value proposition: Evaluate the value proposition of your competitors to identify what sets them apart from others. Understand how they position themselves in the market and what unique selling points they offer to their customers.
• Assess their strengths and weaknesses: Analyze both the strengths and weaknesses of your competitors to identify potential opportunities and threats. This assessment will help you understand areas where you can outperform your competitors and areas where you need to improve.
• Study their pricing and marketing strategies: Analyze your competitors' pricing models and marketing strategies. This will help you determine if your pricing is competitive and if your marketing efforts are aligned with industry standards.
• Explore customer reviews and feedback: Review customer feedback and reviews about your competitors. This will provide you with insights into what customers value and what areas your competitors excel in. You can then use this information to enhance your own customer-centric approach.
• Use tools and resources: Utilize online tools and resources, such as industry reports, market research data, and trade publications, to gather information about your competitors.
• Stay updated: Continuously monitor your competitors to stay updated on any changes in their strategies or offerings. This will help you adapt your business plan accordingly.
• Foster collaboration: Consider collaborating with complementary businesses rather than viewing them purely as competitors. This can open up new opportunities and help you provide a more comprehensive customer-centric experience.

Clearly Define The Value Proposition And Unique Selling Points.

Defining your value proposition is essential for a customer-centric business plan. It is what sets your business apart from the competition and highlights the unique benefits you offer to your target customers. To clearly define your value proposition and unique selling points, consider the following steps:

• Identify your target customers: Understand who your ideal customers are, their preferences, needs, and pain points. This will help you tailor your value proposition to address their specific requirements.
• Analyze the competition: Conduct a thorough competitive analysis to identify what other businesses in your industry are offering and how you can differentiate yourself.
• Highlight your strengths: Identify your core strengths and capabilities that make you stand out. These could include factors such as product quality, exceptional customer service, unique features, or specialized expertise.
• Understand customer benefits: Determine the specific benefits your customers will gain from choosing your business. Will your product or service save them time, improve their well-being, enhance their status, or solve a particular problem?
• Create a compelling message: Craft a concise and impactful statement that communicates your unique value proposition to your target customers. Your message should clearly articulate the benefits they can expect and why they should choose your business over others.

Tips for defining your value proposition:

• Focus on the most meaningful benefits that resonate with your target customers.
• Use customer testimonials or case studies to support your value proposition.
• Emphasize your unique selling points and differentiate yourself from the competition.
• Keep your value proposition concise and easy to understand.
• Regularly refine and update your value proposition as customer needs and market trends evolve.

By clearly defining your value proposition and highlighting your unique selling points, you will be able to effectively communicate the benefits of your business to your target customers. This will help attract their attention, build trust, and ultimately drive customer loyalty and revenue.

Develop a Customer Segmentation Strategy

Developing a customer segmentation strategy is a crucial step in creating a customer-centric business plan. By segmenting your target audience into specific groups based on their characteristics, preferences, and behaviors, you can customize your offerings and tailor your marketing efforts to effectively reach and engage each segment.

1. Research and analyze your target market: Start by conducting thorough research on your target market to gain insights into their demographics, psychographics, and buying behaviors. This information will help you identify distinct customer segments that exist within your market.

2. Identify common characteristics: Once you have gathered data on your target market, look for common characteristics or factors that can be used to group customers together. These factors can include age, gender, income level, geographic location, lifestyle, interests, or purchasing habits.

• Utilize customer surveys, interviews, and data analytics tools to gather accurate and detailed information about your target audience.
• Consider conducting focus groups or market research studies to gain deeper insights into customer preferences and behaviors.

3. Define customer segments: Once you have identified common characteristics, create distinct customer segments based on these similarities. Each segment should represent a specific group of customers who share similar needs, preferences, or behaviors.

4. Prioritize target segments: Evaluate the potential value and profitability of each customer segment to prioritize which ones to focus on. Consider factors such as the size of the segment, its growth potential, and its alignment with your business objectives and capabilities.

• Segmenting your customers can help you allocate your resources more efficiently, as different segments may require different marketing tactics or product offerings.
• Regularly review and update your customer segments based on market changes and evolving customer needs.

5. Tailor your offerings: With a clear understanding of each customer segment, customize your products, services, and messaging to meet their specific needs and preferences. This tailored approach will enhance the customer experience and increase their loyalty and satisfaction.

6. Create personalized marketing campaigns: Develop marketing campaigns that are targeted to each customer segment. Craft messages and visuals that resonate with their unique characteristics and address their specific pain points or desires.

By developing a customer segmentation strategy, you can ensure that your business is effectively catering to the diverse needs and preferences of your target market. It allows you to deliver personalized experiences, build stronger relationships with your customers, and ultimately drive greater business success.

Create A Customer Journey Map To Understand The Customer Experience

One essential step in developing a customer-centric business plan is to create a customer journey map . This map provides a visual representation of the customer's interactions and experiences with your business at every touchpoint throughout their entire journey. It allows you to gain a deeper understanding of their needs, emotions, and pain points at each stage.

Creating a customer journey map involves identifying all the touchpoints and interactions a customer has with your business, from initial awareness to post-purchase support. These touchpoints could include your website, social media platforms, customer service interactions, and even physical locations if applicable.

Once you have identified the touchpoints, it is crucial to map out the customer's actions, thoughts, and emotions at each stage. This will help you understand the pain points, moments of delight, and opportunities for improvement. It will also provide insights into how to align your business processes to create a seamless and personalized customer experience.

A customer journey map typically includes the following components:

• Persona or customer profile: Create fictional representations of your target customers, including their demographics, motivations, and goals.
• Stages of the customer journey: Define the key stages, such as awareness, consideration, purchase, and post-purchase.
• Touchpoints and interactions: Identify all the relevant touchpoints and interactions a customer has with your business.
• Customer actions, thoughts, and emotions: Map out what the customer does, thinks, and feels at each stage and touchpoint.
• Pain points and opportunities: Highlight the challenges and frustrations customers may experience, as well as opportunities for improvement.

Tips for Creating a Customer Journey Map:

• Involve different stakeholders in the process to gain a comprehensive perspective.
• Collect data from customer surveys, interviews, and feedback to validate your assumptions and fill gaps in your understanding.
• Regularly update and refine your customer journey map as customer preferences and behaviors evolve.
• Use visual tools such as diagrams or flowcharts to make the map easily understandable and accessible to all team members.

By creating a customer journey map , you will be able to identify pain points and opportunities to improve the customer experience. This understanding will guide your decision-making process, allowing you to develop strategies and initiatives that align with your customers' needs and preferences.

Determine The Marketing And Sales Approach.

Once you have identified your target market and their needs, it is essential to determine the most effective marketing and sales approach to reach and engage your customers. This step is crucial as it will shape the way you promote your products or services and ultimately drive sales.

1. Define your marketing channels: Consider the most appropriate channels to reach your target market effectively. This could include digital platforms such as social media, email marketing, and search engine optimization, as well as traditional marketing channels like print media, radio, or television advertising.

2. Craft your brand messaging: Develop a compelling brand message that resonates with your target audience. Highlight the unique value proposition and benefits of your personalized services to differentiate yourself from competitors.

3. Develop a customer acquisition strategy: Outline how you will attract and convert potential customers into paying clients. This could involve tactics such as offering exclusive discounts, partnering with influencers, or utilizing referral programs.

4. Create a sales strategy: Determine the most effective approach to selling your personalized products or services. This could involve training sales representatives to provide excellent customer service, implementing upselling techniques, or offering personalized product demonstrations.

Tips for determining the marketing and sales approach:

• Regularly evaluate the performance of your marketing and sales efforts and make necessary adjustments to optimize results.
• Utilize customer feedback to tailor your marketing messages and sales approach to better meet their needs.
• Stay up to date with industry trends and explore innovative marketing techniques to stay ahead of the competition.

By determining a well-defined marketing and sales approach, you can effectively promote and sell your personalized products or services to your target market. Remember to adapt and refine your strategies as needed to ensure continuous growth and success.

Forecast The Expected Revenue And Expenses.

As a crucial step in writing a customer-centric business plan, forecasting the expected revenue and expenses helps you understand the financial viability and sustainability of your business model. By estimating the potential income and expenditure, you can make informed decisions and set realistic goals for your customer-centric business.

To forecast the expected revenue, start by analyzing the market research and customer segmentation data you have gathered. Identify the potential customer base and determine the average value of a customer. Consider factors such as pricing, sales volume, and customer retention rates to calculate the expected revenue over a specific timeframe.

When estimating expenses, take into account the costs associated with offering personalized services and delivering an exceptional customer experience. These expenses may include staff wages, training, customized product development, marketing campaigns, and operational costs. Make sure to consider all the necessary resources and infrastructure required to cater to your customer-centric approach.

Here are some tips for accurately forecasting your revenue and expenses:

• Consult with industry experts or seek professional advice to ensure your financial projections align with market trends.
• Regularly review and update your financial forecasts as your business evolves and adapts to customer feedback and changing market dynamics.
• Consider different scenarios and create contingency plans to mitigate potential risks and uncertainties.
• Employ financial forecasting tools and software to streamline the process and improve accuracy.

Once you have estimated the expected revenue and expenses, you can calculate key financial metrics such as gross profit margin, net profit margin, and return on investment. These metrics will provide insights into the feasibility of your customer-centric business model and help you make necessary adjustments to maximize profitability while ensuring an exceptional customer experience.

Establish The Required Resources And Infrastructure.

Once you have identified your target market, defined your value proposition, and planned your marketing and sales approach, it's important to consider the resources and infrastructure needed to support your customer-centric business model.

1. Human Resources: Determine the number and skills of employees needed to provide personalized service and meet customer demands. Consider hiring individuals with strong interpersonal skills, industry knowledge, and the ability to adapt to changing customer needs.

2. Technology: Invest in the right technology tools and systems that will enable you to efficiently collect and analyze customer data, track customer interactions, and deliver personalized experiences. This may include customer relationship management (CRM) software, data analytics tools, and customer feedback platforms.

3. Training and Development: Ensure your employees are trained to effectively engage with customers and deliver personalized services. Offer ongoing training programs to keep your team updated on the latest industry trends, customer preferences, and techniques for providing excellent customer experiences.

4. Physical Infrastructure: Evaluate whether your current physical infrastructure, such as office space, store layout, or production facilities, aligns with your customer-centric approach. Consider any necessary updates or enhancements to create an environment that supports personalized service delivery.

5. Partnerships or Collaborations: Identify potential partnerships or collaborations with suppliers, manufacturers, or service providers who share your customer-centric values. These partnerships can help you deliver high-quality, customized products and services to your customers.

• Regularly review and update your resources and infrastructure to ensure they align with changing customer needs and market trends.
• Seek feedback from your employees and customers to identify any gaps or areas for improvement in your resources and infrastructure.
• Stay informed about advancements in technology that can enhance your ability to deliver personalized experiences.

By establishing the required resources and infrastructure, you are laying the foundation for a successful customer-centric business. Remember that continuously monitoring and adapting your resources and infrastructure will help you stay ahead in meeting your customers' evolving needs and expectations.

Identify Potential Risks And Develop A Risk Management Plan.

Once you have conducted your research, defined your target market, and developed your customer-centric business plan, it is crucial to identify potential risks that could impact the success of your venture. By proactively identifying and addressing these risks, you can minimize their potential impact and ensure the long-term viability of your business.

To begin, analyze and assess potential risks that may arise in various aspects of your business. Consider factors such as market competition, changes in consumer preferences, economic conditions, regulatory requirements, and potential operational vulnerabilities.

• Customer Dissatisfaction: One of the most significant risks in a customer-centric business model is not meeting customer expectations. This could lead to customer dissatisfaction, negative word-of-mouth, and a decline in sales. To mitigate this risk, focus on understanding your customers' needs and continuously improving your products, services, and customer experience.
• Competitive Landscape: With a personalized service model, it is essential to monitor the competitive landscape. Identify competitors who offer similar personalized experiences and analyze their strategies. This will help you differentiate your business and stay ahead in the market.
• Technological Advances: Technology plays a crucial role in delivering personalized experiences. However, rapid technological advancements can pose risks if not properly understood and adopted. Stay updated with the latest technological trends and invest in necessary infrastructure and training to remain competitive.
• Supply Chain Disruptions: Dependence on suppliers for customized products or services can expose your business to risks. Develop contingency plans and alternative sourcing options to mitigate potential disruptions in your supply chain.
• Financial Uncertainty: Every business faces financial risks. Conduct a thorough financial analysis, including revenue and expense forecasts, to identify potential financial challenges. Develop strategies to manage cash flow, secure adequate funding, and diversify revenue sources to ensure financial stability.

Tips for Developing a Risk Management Plan:

• Regularly review and update your risk management plan to adapt to changing market conditions and emerging risks.
• Assign responsibility for risk management to specific individuals within your organization.
• Train your employees on risk management practices and make them aware of potential risks.
• Establish effective communication channels to quickly identify and address any emerging risks.
• Consider insurance options to mitigate potential financial impacts resulting from unforeseen events.

By identifying potential risks and developing a comprehensive risk management plan, you will be better equipped to navigate challenges and ensure the sustainability of your customer-centric business.

In conclusion, writing a customer-centric business plan involves several key steps to ensure success in today's competitive market. By thoroughly researching the target market, understanding customer needs, and developing a unique value proposition, businesses can create a strong foundation for customer satisfaction and loyalty.

Conducting a competitive analysis and implementing a customer segmentation strategy allows businesses to tailor their offerings to specific customer groups, while a customer journey map helps visualize the overall customer experience. Determining the marketing and sales approach, forecasting revenue and expenses, and establishing the necessary resources and infrastructure are crucial for operational success.

Lastly, identifying potential risks and developing a risk management plan safeguards the business against any unforeseen challenges. By following these nine steps, businesses can create a customer-centric business plan that sets them apart from their competitors, drives customer satisfaction, and ultimately leads to long-term success.

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Customer-Centric Approach: The Key to a Successful Business Plan

Anyone can create a business plan, but will it make their business successful, this is dependent on most crucial factor: Customer-Centric Approach. In today’s market, lots of things are getting changed, and everything is rapidly evolving from competition to customer preference. In these types of conditions, only businesses that focus on concentrating on the Customers can survive and evolve.

Understanding the Customer-Centric Philosophy

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A Customer-Centric approach is something that in every aspect of their business focuses mainly on the needs and desires of the customers. This concept even goes beyond giving the best customer service. In simple terms, it’s all about completely building your business plan around how to give the best value to your customers.

And this process involves understanding customer behaviors, preferences, pain points, and aspirations. Since Customer-Centric Philosophy is a crucial factor we always believe that it is good to get a business plan service that can make your plan more customer-centric.

Benefits of a Customer-Centric Business Plan

There are lots of benefits you can get when you incorporate Customer-Centric Approach to your business plan such as

Increased Customer Loyalty: Once you cater according to the needs of the customer, most of the customers will stay loyal to your brand whatever the competition is.

Competitive Advantage: If you are doing a business that offers a similar product or service in the market, the only thing that can differentiate you from your competitors is your approach toward the customers.

Increase Revenue: Once your customers are satisfied they are going to give you repeat business and even good referrals which can give you a boost to your revenue.

Improved Product Development : Good customer feedback can always lead to better development in your products so that you can ensure how your new products are getting received well among customers or not.

Allen Brown

The information contained in this article is for informational purposes only and is not in any way intended to substitute professional advice, medical care or advice from your doctor.

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