Building a customer-centric company and a customer-centric culture is like climbing a mountain peak. It takes vision, planning, determination, and teamwork, but the heights and sense of accomplishment are worth the effort.
It seems one challenge facing many executives is the sense that culture change is too difficult and daunting to even begin. In response, here are three simple things executives can do today to get started on their customer-centric culture change.
Watch What You Say
Just as mama said, choose your words carefully. In our world of customer experience strategy, this means clearly articulating what you intend to deliver to customers and why. Help everyone to understand how decisions are made, what behaviors are encouraged and rewarded and which will not be tolerated. The clearer and simpler your language, the better. Your employees will get it and your customers will thank you. As Kate Keifer Lee from UX Magazine said:
Add an Extra Chair
Amazon is legendary for delivering consistently great customer experience examples, as we wrote about in a previous post “Could You Compete Against a Customer Experience Giant?”. Amazon sits at the top of many customer service rankings, including our recent Most Engaged Customer Experience research. There are many reasons for Amazon’s success, but one of them is certainly the empty chair at the meeting room table. Attend a meeting with Jeff Bezos and you’ll see an empty chair there. Its purpose is to remind those around the table that the customer must be front and center, even during internal conversations. The chair is a physical reminder reinforcing Amazon’s customer first focus.
Walk the Talk
While talk is important, actions matter more. Be hyper aware of what your organization is doing--not just what it says it’s doing. Since credibility is so easy to lose, leaders must walk the talk of customer centricity every single day.
We encourage you to take your first steps. Get started on your expedition today by adopting these three simple tactics to make 2014 a year in which you achieve great heights.
~Frank Rowe
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