6 proven steps to build a customer-centric culture

If possible, add open-ended questions that allow employees, in their own words, to suggest how to create a stronger customer-experience culture.

An off-the-shelf customer-experience maturity assessment is another option. These are simple and require participation from only a handful of subject-matter experts from your organization. We recommend Forrester’s Gauge Your CX Management Maturity, Gartner Research’s Customer Experience Management Maturity Model, or Qualtrics’ Customer Experience Competency and Maturity Assessment.

Once the executive team is aligned on a customer experience vision and plan, focus on embedding customer-centric goals at the company, team, and individual level.

At an organizational level, partner with the folks who lead annual strategic planning and companywide goal setting (typically corporate strategy) to ensure that corporate goals are designed to drive a customer-first mentality and reinforce customer-centric behaviors. Build customer centricity into your annual planning by answering two essential questions: Do funding priorities align with your top customer experience needs? Do your organizational goals measure your customers’ outcomes and success?

To ensure every individual in the organization is accountable to customer-centric goals, engage your human resources leaders to review team and individual goal-setting so that everyone has a customer-centric goal in their performance objectives and knows that customer-centric behaviors will be rewarded.

To encourage the entire organization to put customers at the center of everything, expose employees to the highs and lows of your customer experience as well as the customer needs.

Here are a few of the most effective strategies:

• Regularly invite customers to teamwide and companywide events so employees can better understand them and learn about their successes and challenges. While exposing your customer pain points in this type of setting can be uncomfortable, it helps keep employees focused on improving customer experience.
• Hold learning sessions where you ask cross-organizational teams to review customer feedback focused on a top customer pain point, and then brainstorm ideas to improve the experience. Informed by customer feedback, each participant will add their own expertise and constraints to the discussion.
• Provide employees with customer-experience insights. Transparency is important! Share your customer-experience insights with all employees—during key employee meetings or via accessible online dashboards and reports—so they include and prioritize customer feedback when planning actions. You may even consider setting up a virtual or physical “customer room,” where employees can access the latest customer journey maps, post-insight reports, and video and voice recordings of customers sharing their experiences.
• Facilitate more direct and personal interactions with customers by letting employees observe sales and support calls (aka ride-alongs). For non-customer-facing employees, this can be a powerful empathy-building tool.

Creating and maintaining your customer-centric culture works best when there is an internal strategic communications plan to keep it top of mind. An effective activation plan will focus on the following elements:

• Work with your executive team to develop and cascade your intended customer experience. A shared vision—one that’s consistently communicated—goes a long way toward establishing the customer-centric culture you’re seeking. Reinforce this customer-centric messaging by telling and retelling the story of how your employees will make your customer-experience ambition a reality.
• Continually update the company on progress toward your established customer-centric metrics. Update all employees at organizational and companywide meetings on your customer experience goals and progress on those goals. Sharing quarterly customer loyalty metrics and employee and customer centricity metrics and targets should be as important as sharing quarterly revenue.
• Celebrate customer-centric employees individually and in front of their peers through formal recognition programs to highlight the behaviors you want all employees to adopt and exemplify. Sharing their customer-centric stories, internally and externally, can help you recruit more like-minded individuals.

It takes consistent effort and attention to sustain a customer-centric culture. It’s an evolving process as you add employees, reorganize corporate structures, introduce new customer experiences, and transition employees to other roles. Even those companies that have a strong customer-culture—and the high NPS and employee engagement scores to prove it—need to continually nurture this ethos.

Developing these steps is hard work but worth it, because a mature customer-centric strategy can lead an organization to world-class results.