Rethinking the Business Roots with a Customer-Driven Culture

Customer retention is the critial factor for growing a business in today’s era especially with the prevailing, stagnant overall economic growth. Today, businesses are increasingly adopting customer-focused business processes to gain competitive advantage, and the organization culture is what drives the focus on customer service. From big companies to industries where product offerings and price no longer provide enough differentiation, this new focus offers a myriad of benefits. Designing an effective customer-driven culture with “customer experience” as the priority is still a battleground for the industries. It revolves around understanding three major factors:

• The People management strategies evolved through the customer insights needed to create a service vision or service personality.

• Creation of a recruitment process that reinforces a customer-driven culture by hiring the proactive, well-motivated people and then developing their knowledge and skills for delivering service excellence through good communication skills, tolerance, empathy, and the ability to interpret service issues and respond appropriately according to the organization’s rules.

• Powerful Communication Strategies adopted by reinforcing the right behaviors in employees through recognition, reward & celebration and creating performance metrics for the organization to routinely and accurately assess its effectiveness for customers.

Even with existing formal methods such as customer service surveys or monitoring customer service metrics, changing a corporate culture isn’t an immediate process, but the mentioned factors can help any business truly embrace the concept of a customer-focused culture.  Proper implementation of such methodology directly impacts organization culture and employees’ loyalty, performance, and retention while improving customer's overall experience.