The most successful companies are the ones that place the customer experience above all other considerations. Yes, that even means over maximizing profits or emphasizing growth. Those customer-centric businesses understand that you need a strong foundation before you can build the rest on top of it. They understand that profits and growth are the natural outcome of focusing on the fundamentals.
Let’s turn to customer-experience expert Annette Franz, whose recent book on this very subject was the focus of a Shep Hyken article up on Forbes: “10 Principles to Create a Customer-Centric Company”. In it, he summarizes many of Franz’s ideas about building a culture around the customer. Let’s discuss three of those ideas today:
1. Employees First
Businesses usually start with the precept that the customer should always be first, and this is a good philosophy. But Franz tells Hyken that we should be prepared to put our employees even more first. Just like we said earlier about how profits and growth are the natural outcomes of a strong foundation, so too is a great customer experience the natural outcome of fulfilled, engaged, and productive employees. When your staff cares about their work—believes in it, even—they are so much more likely to want to do their jobs well. That will result in far better outcomes for your customers, and it’ll help guarantee that your best employees remain with you for many years to come.
2. People Before Products
Many businessowners are passionate about their own products and services. A restaurateur who really believes in his or her food, for example, is going to want to deliver the best dishes. That’s a good instinct to have. But Franz cautions us to not believe in movie lines, like this one from Field of Dreams: “If you build it, they will come.” You can develop a product and hope that it’ll attract an audience on its own, and maybe it will. But the truth is, you really should start with your audience and develop products and services around their needs or expectations. If your area has a large vegan demographic, you would be leaving money on the table if you resisted adding corresponding menu options because they’re not items you would eat.
3. Outside-In Thinking
Franz defines outside-in thinking as, “bringing the customer’s voice into the decisions we make.” This is compared to inside-out thinking, which says, “we think we know what’s best for our customers, and that’s what we’re going to do.” Put that way, most of us would naturally gravitate towards the former because it’s clearly the most logical. Why would we ever assume we could know the minds of customers? That said, many, many businesses do make those assumptions all the time, including our example above of a restauranter only offering the dishes he would want to eat. You have to take steps to understand what your customers want, not just feel the situation out. Sometimes that means offering alternatives, and sometimes that means even having to let go of products or services that aren’t popular, despite how much you might love them.
Your Next Step
Executing on any of these three principles requires a great deal of knowledge: you have to know your employees, your products, and your customers to achieve anything. What you need is an independent set of eyes on what you’re doing. That’s where The Brandt Group comes in. We specialize in market research and customer-service development. Our services include employee feedback surveys, mystery-shopping, and customer satisfaction surveys, all of which you can use to discover how to keep your business built upon a strong customer-centric foundation. This knowledge will help you fuel a plan, and that plan will guide your company’s future success.
It’s not enough to be reactive to the market, waiting for problems to emerge before you consider solutions. By being proactive—by taking the steps to better understand your business, your employees, and your customers—you can take charge of that future success. Again, profit and growth are the natural outcomes of a strong foundation. Let’s build that future on having the absolute best customer experience, starting today.
