How to Develop a Customer-Centric Mindset in Your Business
As an entrepreneur, you know how important it is to stay focused on your customers in order to grow your business and stay ahead of the competition. However, it can be a challenge to get your team to prioritize customer needs over internal concerns like employee benefits and company policies. In this article, we’ll share three methods for developing a customer-centric mindset in your business, based on our experience building successful companies.
Create Customer-Focused Core Values
Your core values are the foundation of your company culture, so it’s essential to ensure that they reflect a customer-centric perspective. When brainstorming your core values, don’t just focus on the traits and behaviors of your team members; also consider the top three deliverables that customers value most. For example, if you run a software company, your core values might include:
– We deliver user-friendly products that solve real problems.
– We provide excellent customer support that goes above and beyond.
– We prioritize data security and privacy in everything we do.
By making your core values specific, action-oriented, and customer-focused, you’ll help embed customer-centric behaviors into your company culture.
Put Yourself in the Customer’s Shoes
To truly understand your customers’ needs and experiences, you need to see things from their perspective. One effective way to do this is to require new team members to make blind purchases from your competitors and fill out a questionnaire about their experience. This allows them to experience your product as a customer would and empowers them to use what they learned to help sell to your customers.
Link Compensation to Customer Satisfaction
Compensation is a powerful motivator, so tying it to customer satisfaction can help encourage a customer-centric mindset throughout your team. Consider setting up a bonus pool that’s tied to customer satisfaction metrics, such as five-star reviews and survey scores. This will incentivize team members to prioritize customer needs and make sure they’re satisfied with your products and services.
Balance Employee Satisfaction and Customer Satisfaction
It’s important to strike a balance between employee satisfaction and customer satisfaction. After all, happy employees are more likely to provide excellent customer service and contribute to your company’s growth and success. However, without satisfied customers, your business won’t last for long. Strive to create a work environment that supports both employee and customer needs, and empower your team to connect those two concepts through your core values, customer research, and compensation metrics.
Summary
Developing a customer-centric mindset is essential for growing your business and staying ahead of the competition. To achieve this mindset, focus on creating customer-focused core values, putting yourself in the customer’s shoes, and tying compensation to customer satisfaction metrics. Strive to balance employee satisfaction and customer satisfaction to create a work environment that supports both.
Additional Piece: The Benefits of Focusing on Customer Experience
Developing a customer-centric mindset has numerous benefits for businesses, both in terms of customer loyalty and revenue growth. Here are just a few of the benefits of focusing on customer experience:
1. Increased customer loyalty: By prioritizing customer needs and providing excellent customer service, you can create loyal customers who are more likely to stick with your business over the long term.
2. Enhanced reputation: Happy customers are more likely to recommend your business to others, which can help boost your reputation and attract new customers through word-of-mouth marketing.
3. Higher revenue: Satisfied customers are more likely to continue doing business with you and make repeat purchases, which can lead to higher revenue and long-term growth.
4. Better product development: By understanding your customers’ needs and pain points, you can create products and services that are more tailored to their needs, which can result in higher satisfaction and loyalty.
5. Competitive advantage: Customer experience is becoming an increasingly important differentiator for businesses, as customers are willing to pay more for products and services that provide a superior experience.
By focusing on customer experience and building a customer-centric mindset, you can reap all of these benefits and more. Remember to prioritize customer needs in all aspects of your business, from your core values to your compensation metrics, and you’ll be well on your way to creating a successful, customer-focused company.
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Opinions expressed by Entrepreneur contributors are their own.
I recently sat down with a fellow entrepreneur to discuss his business. I asked him what experiences he could share that would help him. He responded almost immediately: “I’m fighting for my team to focus less on themselves and more on our customers and their needs.”
Specifically, he shared that many of his team meetings have nothing to do with the customer, but instead focus on the company, its people, or its policies. For example, deciding whether to create a nap room or provide maternity leave for pets. Since he is in a creative field and we live in Portland, Oregon where we feel good, I guess he has a bit of a headwind trying to guide his team to think less about employee benefits and more about serving to his clients.
I have experience to share about raising a customer centric mindset.
I have been building my third company for a year and a half. Over time, the companies my team and I built have evolved to become increasingly customer-centric, and are experiencing increasing success in large part because of that. This third company has the highest customer satisfaction ratings we have ever received.
We produced these results using three methods that promote a customer-centric mindset. The combination of all three essentially codes the customer as the priority.
Related: 3 Ways to Build a Customer-Centric Company Culture
1. Create Customer-Focused Core Values
When I looked at my friend’s five core values, none even remotely involved the customer. They all focused on the types of people who work there and their behavioral mindset, mostly towards each other.
Two of our four core values revolve around customer service (“We Care” and “We Inspire 5-Star Reviews”). Customers see these displayed in different ways, which helps us stand out from other businesses. In team meetings, we often recognize examples of these two values, and all team members are rated based on how they represent these values during their annual performance review.
It is the responsibility of a leader to ensure that the customer point of view it’s part of your discussion of core values.
When we started the company, we held off-site meetings so the team could brainstorm our core values. While it is common practice during this exercise to identify what the best team members have in common and choose those as core values, it is also critical to consider the top three deliverables that customers value most and that make the company stand out from the competition. Then, identify specific, action-oriented core values that they can deliver to the level required to achieve the vision and growth you described.
Although reworking your core values can be very difficult, a reduction in values where half of them are focused on the customer or the types of features that best serve your customer is key to improving business performance. Because core values work like your company’s DNA, this embeds customer-focused behaviors.
2. Put yourself in the customer’s shoes
What processes or experiences would help team members understand your customer’s unique characteristics? journey and therefore improve it? New team members have a fresh perspective that can add value to your company. It’s up to you to take advantage of that.
We require that new team members make blind purchases from competitors, just as a new customer would. They fill out a questionnaire about each competitor. During your orientation, I ask you to compare what you saw and experienced in our store with our competitor’s stores.
This not only allows them experience being a customer of our product, but also empowers them to use what they learned to help sell to our customers, having literally walked in their shoes.
Related: How to become a more customer-centric company in 5 steps
3. Link compensation to customer satisfaction
Another powerful way to inspire customer focus is to encourage it through compensation. There are many different compensation structures to accomplish this.
At our company, frontline team members are compensated in a variety of ways. About 20% of his ongoing monetary compensation comes from a bonus pool tied to customer satisfaction. Your bonus percentage is calculated from the number of five-star reviews received and the percentage of promoters from our customer service survey.
In addition, these measures of satisfaction, combined with your annual review core value ratings, are used to determine your annual company profit-sharing allocation. There is no substitute for the power of this direct connection to happy customers. The happier our customers are, the more money our frontline team members make.
balance seesaw
When you started your business, did you do it solely to make your employees happy? Probably not. Most likely, you have seen a need or a problem and wanted to solve it to improve the lives of your customers.
That being said, a great work environment and a strong company culture are also important. After all, superior customer satisfaction cannot be achieved unless your employees are happy — the two concepts are not mutually exclusive.
The connection between employee happiness and customer satisfaction is like a seesaw, requiring a delicate balance that each business leader must strike on their own terms. As you gauge where the weight will go, remember that without satisfied customers, the business will not survive for long.
A customer-focused perspective is key to long-term success, allowing for the opportunity for continued employee satisfaction. When you empower employees to connect those two concepts through core values, putting yourself in the customer’s shoes, and compensation tied to customer satisfaction, you’ve implemented a trifecta of winning strategies that should codify your company to find its ideal balance. and prosper for decades. .
https://www.entrepreneur.com/growing-a-business/3-methods-to-unlock-the-mindset-you-need-for-more-success/452928
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