There’s no doubt customer centred organisations perform better.

However, building customer focus into the organisational DNA is a marathon, not a sprint.

Organisations can accelerate this journey by being clear on ‘what good looks like’ and having a compelling vision. They can bring it to life by improving and digitising operational processes and making it real for people through their roles and ways of working, whilst leveraging data to listen, learn and engage with customers.

Why customer focus?

Customer focus is crucial as customers demand outstanding experiences. Customer-centric organisations are 60% more profitable¹ as customer advocates are more likely to re-purchase, try new offerings, complain less and are more willing to forgive mistakes. While those who receive poor service share it on social media, with 96%² being likely to switch to a competitor.

Building customer focus into an organisation’s DNA helps to consistently satisfy or exceed customer needs while delivering better outcomes like advocacy, improved employee experience and increased profits. While customer focus is more common in consumer facing organisations, the same themes and outcomes apply for organisations with little or no direct contact with customers.

Orienting your organisation around the customer is not a one-size-fits-all journey, but there are ways to accelerate this and deliver impact faster.

1. Be clear on what good looks like

Creating an inspiring customer vision for your people and customers helps build a platform for positive change. Walking in customers’ shoes and co-designing customer journeys is important for building alignment and the necessary excitement for change to stick.

Organisations driven to create customer centred strategies are focused on simplicity, personalised customer journeys and thoughtful customer segmentation. This allows them to deliver differentiated experiences in key Moments of Truth—moments of emotional engagement like buying a first home, planning for retirement or claiming for a loss. One organisation lacking a shared language faced challenges with teams using different approaches. They overcame this by designing customer centred principles using simple, jargon-free language everyone understood.

There is also significant opportunity to personalise by leveraging data and AI to help predict needs and proactively nudge customers at the right time. An insurance organisation recently used AI to autodetect activities not covered in their policy and nudged customers to take additional cover through in-app pop-ups. Balancing innovation with privacy and regulations is crucial to navigating these new opportunities.

Since customer expectations frequently change, this can’t be a ‘set and forget’ approach. Your strategy must evolve, making trade-off decisions for when to overdeliver vs. just satisfy expectations. This requires feedback and co-designing with customers to drive innovation. For example, one neo bank publishes their development roadmap to solicit feedback and create accountability, fostering a relationship where customers feel they have a stake in their bank’s direction.

To balance empowerment with alignment to brand and strategy, an intentional engagement model is helpful. This may include a customer experience (CX) Centre of Excellence with embedded CX design roles, who are typically champions of customer centric change helping make it real and scalable.

2. Bring your strategy to life through operations

Making your customer vision real requires end to end operational accountability and alignment of operational processes, to enable trade off decisions to be made with minimum negotiations and hand overs.

One organisation successfully combined operations and CX accountability into one function. This kept customer outcomes front of mind in the Operations teams and created clarity of contribution for non-customer facing roles. When done right it can lead to massive gains, as exemplified by an organisation who improved people, process and system performance within contact centres to increase their Net Promoter Score (NPS) by 32%.

3. Digitising customer journeys end to end

When aligning operations around the customer, digital needs to be front and centre. Customers expect digital by default and are increasingly seeking self-service. Digital natives like Uber don’t get many phone calls, instead offering seamless end-to-end digital experiences, raising customers’ expectations.

Many organisations are implementing digital transformation programmes to deliver end-to-end digital, personalised journeys and bring strategies to life. Prioritising the most impactful journeys is critical to getting the most from these programmes. This involves reimagining customer journeys end to end, rather than just implementing point solutions (e.g., only digitising front end, with emails in the back end) and fixing customer pain points over chasing shiny toys.

We assessed a transaction process for major Financial Services companies with fancy front ends, chatbots or live chat. However, their underlying operational process involved manual, non-digital steps (e.g., documents needing physical signatures and attachments), which aren’t uploaded in a way that allows OCR³ and automation processing. While they have digitised, their journey isn’t seamless and takes longer than it should in customers’ eyes, meaning customers are unhappy and the organisation is not realising the full efficiency benefits. Effectively digitising and automating the end-to-end customer journey and operational processes can boost customer advocacy while improving efficiency by 15-25%.

4. Make it real for your people through roles and ways of working

Organisations are increasingly creating customer-focused accountabilities and roles in key teams to improve value propositions and speed to market.

Designing an organisational model to deliver for customers can take varying forms, depending on the speed of customer releases and the complexity of change in your industry. Delivering excellent CX requires seamless collaboration and contribution from different functions (e.g., product, finance, marketing, UX, etc.). To encourage collaboration, organisations should focus on building end-to-end customer accountability and breaking down functional siloes through cross-functional teams. When the speed of change requires rapid iterations, organisations accelerate their speed to market with dedicated customer journey teams and focusing them to address customers’ needs, resolve pain points and innovating in key Moments of Truth.

Bringing it to life in day-to-day behaviours requires embedding customer centricity into ways of working. Keeping feedback and data at the heart of decision making and ensuring leaders regularly walk in customers’ shoes are just as critical. Some organisations collect regular feedback on new products and test propositions, without exception, before launch. Others have top leaders, such as Apple’s Tim Cook4, actively engaging with customer feedback to build empathy.

 5. Use data to proactively build partnerships with customers

Becoming an empathetic organisation who listens and learns from customers requires data and CX metrics to be measured, analysed and regularly made visible to everyone. Embedding CX into performance conversations and governance forums enables accountability for customer outcomes by hardwiring feedback into enterprise priorities to resolve issues and pain points. This also supports NPS, where the biggest opportunities are often to turn passive customers into advocates. As for detractors, don’t convince them they are wrong, just listen and learn.

It is important to create a single view of customers by triangulating different data sources (e.g., customer advocacy, call volume drivers, digital dropout rates, etc.). When analysed, these insights can inform how and when to engage with customers beyond the traditional customer journey to build a closer partnership, increase sales and prevent churn. Our clients successfully utilise prescriptive analytics to understand behavioural drivers at a granular level, resulting in more personalised engagement with customers, reducing churn and increasing sales conversion by up to 85%. One organisation rolled out detailed customer metrics along the journey and implemented real-time NPS. These linked to operational metrics at key touch points and aligned to Listen, Learn, Act feedback loops which led to a 30bpts improvement.

The result?

A more empathetic organisation with lasting impact.

Customer-centred organisations perform better, as advocates stay longer, are less likely to seek alternatives and are more profitable, making it a necessity to listen, learn and innovate around the customer to effectively compete and achieve better business outcomes. Building this customer centricity into the organisational DNA is a journey requiring time, commitment, leadership and intentional design.

1. Forbes, Ninety-Six Percent Of Customers Will Leave You For Bad Customer Service
2. Forbes, 6 things customer-centric companies do differently
3. Optical Character Recognition, also known as text recognition, extracts data from scanned documents, eliminating the need for manual data entry

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About the authors

Patrycja Stasina

Partner

Patrycja has over 20 years of experience helping organisations around the world unlock customer value by empowering them and their people to become more outcomes focused. Her experience is from a combination of management consulting and senior leadership roles. She combines a strategic lens with pragmatic solution design and a focus on bringing the best out in people to deliver lasting impact.

Amber Dixon

Senior Associate

Amber has over 4 years of experience helping global organisations make a lasting impact. Her expertise lies in transforming organisations to be more customer-centric, optimising strategy to improve performance and deliver results across a variety of sectors.