What is Customer-Centric DNA?
Before we discuss any further let us first understand, what is customer-centric DNA?
This is because we primarily need to understand can you develop it, or is it that your business must be born with it as the term DNA means:
“The fundamental and distinctive characteristics or qualities of someone or something, especially when regarded as unchangeable”.
While on the other hand, the word “Centricity” implies:
“Being situated at the center; a position of central prominence or importance”.
Therefore accordingly “Customer-Centric DNA” literally means your business is customer-centered in all its actions and activities.
Now all the best-loved brands across the globe have a propensity to be “born” with a customer-centric DNA. Since with companies like Google, Amazon, Caterpillar, BMW, Harley Davidson, Johnson & Johnson, IBM, IDEO, and others actively align their interests with all stakeholder groups and can perform seemingly contradictory things such as paying high wages to their employees, charge low prices from their customers and last but not the least generate high profits.
How can your business develop customer-centric DNA?
Now as weaving customer-centric thinking in everything that everyone does in your company does not require any extra-work, hence make customer-centricity a context for all the works that you perform for your business.
This is because the term DNA refers to all the salient characteristics that are embedded in the fabric of your existence.
For example, if you are a parent, you can easily relate this concept, whereby your children are the focal point of every decision that you make, whether it is what you want to have for breakfast, or which TV you want to buy, or where you want to go for a vacation, whether you are going to work late, and so on.
Hence customer-centric DNA in business implies that your customers are also the context of every single decision that you make in your company and even for all parties with which you are associated with for running your business.
Therefore, in this article we have explained how you can establish customer-centric DNA in your businesses’ values, strategies, structure, policies, processes, engagements, motives, innovations, and improvements with these four basic prerequisites that foretell customer-centricity and business growth:
Prerequisite #1
Align from the Top
With a customer-centric DNA for your company- the buck stops at the top.
Hence, anything that is presumed at odds with your customer’s well-being spells faults and blemishes your company’s DNA, and so you must focus your company on the goals of your customer segments, and thereafter sync your brand’s mission, vision, values, structure, objectives, and rituals with these customer’s goals.
To do this coordinate all the roles that manage any part of the CX (Customer Experience), then establish them as influencers and facilitators for the rest of the company and so set yourself you for success.
Prerequisite #2
All Hands On-the-Deck
As the old adage goes “a chain is as strong as its weakest link”, hence each executive in your company who reports to the CEO plays a mission-critical role in building up your brand’s customer-centric DNA.
Therefore your organization must be ready to attune its workflow and processes to the VoC (Voice-of-the-Customer) so that all functional areas in your company must fit in these three elements into their daily works:
Anticipate the reaction of the customers to their decisions
Thwart recurrence of issues for the whole customer-base
Seamlessly create mutual value across the end-to-end customer lifecycle for boosting CX
Now for this, as cross-organization collaboration is extremely important, buy CRM which is a cutting-edge business growth technology and tool that can help connect with high visibility the cause-and-effect metrics and provide a holistic view for empowering upstream functions in your company.
Prerequisite #3
Maximize Value Attainment
As the aphorism goes “feed the hand that feeds you”, so empower all the employees in your company to be creative in ushering new values that customers will reward and establish a systemic cycle for attaining company-wide attention on the root causes to prevent recurrence of your customer’s chronic issues.
Adopt business growth tools like easy to use CRM for your business that can help in simplifying your team’s works to enable their effectiveness and efficiency towards making your customers happy by employing customer-centric capabilities for all partners, and employees in your company, since it must be always remembered that your customer’s success is what leads to your success in business.
Prerequisite #4
Maintain Transparency
As like attracts like, hence earn the trust of your customers, since the strength of relationships is built on trustworthiness.
Be humble, straightforward, brave and generous with your employees, partners, customers, and partners of all kinds who are related to your company.
Nurture unquenchable curiosity about your customers and remember it is only consistent performance over time, and across end-to-end customer journeys are the only factors that can prevent surprises by welcoming early warning signals that can outlaw non-confirmers to your customer-centric management.
Conclusion
Therefore even though it is best for any business to be “born” with a customer-centric DNA, however, if you are willing to embed it by following the four stated prerequisites illustrated in this article in cadenced aspects of running your business, regardless of your other investments in customer experience, inject customer-centric DNA across your company does indeed creates an ongoing legacy of value-generation and organic growth.
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