As a business owner or operator, you know the importance of customer-centricity. The data shows that companies with a strong customer focus outperform their competition. But how do you maintain that focus as your business grows and internal complexity creeps in?

In this article, we’ll explore the importance of customer-centricity and provide actionable tips for staying focused on your customers. We’ll also discuss how to maintain a feedback loop that can power talent recruitment and retention.

The Importance of Customer-Centered Business

According to a survey from California Review Management, companies with a “very mature” customer focus experienced 2.5X the revenue growth of companies with a “very immature” focus. This data shows that customer-centered businesses outperform their competition.

Customer-centricity is not just about providing good customer service. It’s about making the customer the center of your business strategy. When done well, a customer-centric approach can touch every aspect of your organization, from product development to marketing to sales.

Engaged employees are a key part of operating a successful customer-centric business. When employees feel connected to the customer, they are more likely to be invested in the success of the business. This can drive a feedback loop that can power talent recruitment and retention.

The Slippery Slope of Losing Sight of the Customer

Unfortunately, it’s all too common for businesses to lose sight of the customer as they grow. Internal “emergencies” and horse-trading across teams can take priority over the needs of the customer. Conversations focus increasingly on colleagues and features, not customers. Strategic thinking becomes process management, instead of thinking about how to innovate to better address customer needs.

This slippery slope can be dangerous for both leaders and operators. Over time, the customer becomes an afterthought. And this can have serious consequences for the business. Most companies don’t make it past the ten-year mark, and losing sight of the customer is often a key reason why.

How to Stay Focused on the Customer

So, how do you stay focused on the customer as your business grows? Here are some actionable tips:

1. Make Customer-Centricity a Core Value

To stay focused on the customer, you need to make customer-centricity a core value of your business. This means making it part of your mission statement and communicating it to your employees at every opportunity.

• Incorporate customer-centric language into your mission statement and core values.
• Encourage employees to prioritize customer needs in all decisions and interactions.
• Train employees on the importance of customer-centricity and how to achieve it.
• Celebrate customer-centric success stories and recognize employees who embody this value.
• Regularly assess and monitor how well the organization is staying true to this core value.

2. Collect and Analyze Customer Feedback

To truly understand your customers, you need to collect and analyze customer feedback. This can be done through surveys, focus groups, and other forms of market research. Use this feedback to inform your product development, marketing, and sales strategies.

• Use surveys, interviews, and social media listening tools to gather feedback from customers.
• Ensure the feedback is organized and easily accessible to relevant teams.
• Analyze the data to identify trends and opportunities for improvement.
• Share the findings with employees across the organization.
• Act on the feedback by implementing changes and improvements based on the customer's needs and feedback.

3. Create Customer Personas

To better understand your customers, create customer personas. A customer persona is a fictional representation of your ideal customer. Use these personas to guide your marketing and sales efforts.

• Conduct research on your target audience to understand their needs, challenges, and preferences.
• Use this information to create detailed customer personas that represent your ideal customers.
• Ensure these personas are widely shared and understood by relevant teams.
• Use the personas to inform product development, marketing strategies, and customer support efforts.
• Regularly update the personas based on customer feedback and changes in the market.

4. Involve Employees in Customer Feedback

Engaged employees are a key part of operating a successful customer-centric business. Involve your employees in the customer feedback process. Encourage them to share their own experiences and insights.

• Encourage all employees to interact with customers and gather feedback whenever possible.
• Provide training on how to effectively collect and respond to customer feedback.
• Use employee feedback to improve customer-facing processes and policies.
• Reward and recognize employees who excel at gathering and responding to customer feedback.
• Empower employees to make decisions that prioritize the customer's needs.

5. Align Your Business Goals with Customer Needs

To stay focused on the customer, you need to align your business goals with customer needs. This means prioritizing customer needs over internal “emergencies” and horse-trading across teams. Keep the customer at the center of every decision you make.

• Regularly review your business goals to ensure they align with customer needs.
• Use customer feedback and personas to inform business decisions and priorities.
• Ensure all teams and employees understand how their work impacts the customer.
• Implement metrics that measure success based on customer outcomes, not just business outcomes.
• Celebrate and reward customer-centric achievements and innovations within the organization.

Refocusing Your Business on Customer-Centricity: How to Get Back on Track

If you're looking to get your quickly growing business back on track and focused on customer-centricity, the task may seem daunting. But fear not, we’ve got you covered with actionable steps to make it happen. Customer-centricity should happen across all roles, levels, and teams, but starting with product development can set an example for the rest of the business. Your product is the tangible delivery of your brand promise and refocusing on customer-centricity should begin here.

Most product development processes have a few phases: Understand, Explore, Refine, and Ship & Learn. During each of these phases, you can center your focus on your customer by prioritizing, operationalizing, and ritualizing certain activities.

Activities to Prioritize

Prioritizing customer-centricity means allocating specific time to it, rather than just fitting it in between other tasks.

1. Understand: Rather than outsourcing research to the research team, sit in on research to gain deeper insights into customer problems.
2. Explore: Review actual research artifacts instead of relying on summaries.
3. Refine: Ask for customer stories and anecdotes to support research syntheses, adding color to research findings.
4. Ship & Learn: Join customer research calls to understand how they’re using specific features in their day-to-day lives.

Activities to Operationalize

As a leader, you can operationalize customer-centricity by embedding activities into existing systems and processes along the product development process.

1. Understand: Block off time on your calendar weekly to asynchronously consume research artifacts.
2. Explore: Ask the research team to create “movie trailers” of customer research projects to give a representative sample.
3. Refine: Begin team meetings or sprint planning meetings with 1-2 customer service calls.
4. Ship & Learn: Invite customers to QBRs (quarterly business reviews) to share their perspectives on how the product is working for them.

Activities to Ritualize

Make customer-centricity ‘sticky’ for teams across the business by creating experiences that build a shared connection with customers.

1. Understand: Require product managers and designers to join a majority of customer research or prioritize customer research where a PM has committed to joining/being involved.
2. Explore: Add a real-world customer story at the beginning of planning templates such as requirement docs, roadmaps, briefs, strategic plans, meeting and event agendas, etc.
3. Refine: Normalize asking questions such as "what is the customer problem we are trying to solve with this work?" and "have we validated that insight with real customers?"
4. Ship & Learn: Create a Slack channel to consolidate and share customer feedback from NPS surveys, Sprig surveys, etc.

To build a strong foundation for customer-centricity, it’s important to focus on product development. By prioritizing, operationalizing, and ritualizing certain activities during each phase, you can center your focus on your customer and set an example for the rest of the business. Remember, customer-centricity should happen across all roles, levels, and teams.

Important questions to keep in mind:

1. How can you ensure that customer needs remain at the forefront of your business, even as you grow and face internal challenges?
2. Are there any aspects of your business that are currently not focused on customer-centricity? How can you start to shift the focus in those areas?
3. What steps can you take to create a culture that prioritizes customer satisfaction and feedback?
4. How can you measure the effectiveness of your customer-centric strategies and ensure that they are driving revenue growth?
5. What role do engaged employees play in building a successful customer-centric business, and how can you cultivate engagement across your organization?
6. How can you balance the needs of your customers with the need for innovation and growth?
7. How can you use customer-centricity as a competitive advantage in a crowded market?

Key Takeaways:

1. Customer-centric businesses outperform their competition: According to the survey cited in the reference notes, companies with a "very mature" customer focus experienced 2.5X the revenue growth of companies with a "very immature" focus. This underscores the importance of prioritizing the needs and satisfaction of your customers if you want your business to succeed.
2. Engaged employees are key to a successful customer-centric business: As noted in the reference, engaged employees are a critical component of a successful customer-centric business, as they can help to create a feedback loop that powers talent recruitment and retention. By creating a culture that prioritizes engagement, you can help to ensure that your employees are invested in delivering excellent customer experiences.
3. Don't lose sight of the customer: As noted in the reference, many companies fail because they lose sight of the customer over time. To avoid this fate, it's important to remain laser-focused on the needs and preferences of your target audience, even as you face internal challenges and seek to innovate.
4. Create a culture of customer feedback: To ensure that your business remains customer-centric, it's important to actively solicit feedback from your customers and use it to drive decision-making across your organization. By creating a culture of feedback and continuous improvement, you can help to ensure that your business remains relevant and competitive over time.
5. Measure the effectiveness of your customer-centric strategies: To ensure that your customer-centric strategies are actually driving revenue growth, it's important to measure their effectiveness using relevant metrics and data. By monitoring key performance indicators (KPIs) and analyzing customer feedback, you can make data-driven decisions that help to optimize your customer experience and drive business success.