How customer-centric is your organisation – the customer centricity check

Convincing a customer to buy a product can be challenging. But it is far from being enough to ensure long-term profits. Evoking customers loyalty is the next step. Naturally, a given product or service has to be promoted first in order to achieve a sufficient level of customer satisfaction. This can only be done by putting the customer on the center stage and constantly enhancing customer experience. However, it is crucial to understand this term in a much wider sense than simply as an improvement of products and service.

But what is the definition of a customer-centric organisation? In the simplest words, customer centricity (CC) is based on making the customer a starting point in all sorts of discussions concerning strategy, operations and processes or innovation. This means adopting the customers’ point of view while creating solutions for them. It sounds simple or even obvious – but according to Bain data, while 80 per cent of all firms think that they deliver superior customer experience, customers share this view in just 8 per cent of the cases. Often certain pain points or specific needs of customers are either not tackled the right way or not even identified by companies.

Thus, the mission of Customer Experience Management is to optimise every touchpoint along the whole customer life cycle and at the same time to increase the number of interactions in the cycle. Optimisation does also include harmonisation of individual customer experience elements. The service or product itself, the innovation process and, particularly important, the brand must be part of a coherent experience and convey the same message. This message should then be developed using the customers’ context.

In order to measure the extent to which a given company has optimised its customer experience, the savvy company has developed a tool called CC Maturity Model. On the basis of four dimensions, the model defines what makes a company customer-centric:

• Strategy and Commitment – Is there a clear strategy that focuses on the customer?
• Customer Experience Design – Is the organisation able to create offers from the customers’ perspective?
• Customer Understanding – Does the organisation understand the needs and the motivations of the customers as well as their liveworlds?
• Organisational Agility – To what extent allow existing processes and structures for a focus on the customer?

To answer those questions and optimise the status quo, the model offers a system of degrees of maturity and key questions to evaluate where a company stands and where it wants to go. Moreover, the system includes 252 factors that serve as reference points for planning and strategy development in the individual business units.

Therefore, the CC Maturity Model not only helps the organisation to check existing strategies and to define goals that match vision, strategy and market situation, but also enables a continuous review of the progress. Since the model is simple in form but specific at the same time, every employee can easily see how he/she is contributing to the goal of optimisation of customer experience and beyond.

The tool is intended to question the status of an organisation, to generate new ideas and to lay the foundation for future strategies. It is suitable for strategy- as well as planning-workshops or can serve as a basis for further analyses.

You can find out how customer-centric your organisation is with our free and easy customer centricity check and get tips for immediate improvement. If you want to achieve full transformational impact and a sustainable competitive advantage with our approach get in touch with us.