Often customer centricity is now reduced to culture. All you need is a customer-centric culture and then the topic of customer centricity practically flies along by itself. It’s not that simple. But culture has an influence — or is an important element — for strengthening customer centricity. A customer-centric culture generally comprises three dimensions:
- Shared common guiding principles
- Norms
- Artefacts
These have an influence on the attitude (customer-centric commitment) and the behaviour (customer-centric citizenship behaviour) of employees. The basis of a culture stems from its genetics, the shared common guiding principles. These shared guiding principles need to be identified and analysed for their compatibility with increasing customer centricity. Customer centricity places people at the centre of all activities. This thought should be shared in the organisation in order to be able to continuously improve customer centricity. In addition, decisions in the organisation should be made on the basis of customer insights. The continuous striving to learn is likewise an important guiding principle. So guiding principles, in contrast to norms, are general, but support an organisation’s customer centricity. Since guiding principles are rather general in nature, the challenge at this point is to create a list of guiding principles that support a customer-centric culture.
The norms of an organisation build on the shared guiding principles. Norms are an important component of the definition of a customer-centric culture. In contrast to rules and control, norms give the individual more freedom for achieving goals, but also more responsibility to interpret them in line with the intention. Norms have a guiding task for goal-oriented action.
Norms describe the behaviour that the members of an organisation impose on one another to follow.
Norms are accordingly explicit or implicit rules about desired or undesired behaviours in organisations. Unclear or contradictory norms can stand in the way of improving customer centricity. Central norms of customer centricity are:
- Aim not at data, but at customer insights.
- Make as few decisions as possible without customer insights.
- Systematically improve the decision processes.
- Transform the organisation in order to be able to respond better to changes.
- Integrate the customer everywhere the value for both parties can be increased.
- Prevent silo thinking in the organisation.
- Evangelise your network too regarding customer centricity.
- Systematically increase the value for both the organisation and the customers.
Norms easily tempt one to write down and communicate every single norm. Besides the depth of hierarchy, the level of bureaucracy of an organisation is expressed in specialisation and the intensity of regulation and documentation. It is, after all, not enough to press customer centricity into the organisation with rules and communication. As well-meant as the mission statements on the walls are, they cannot be experienced. That’s why norms must never stand on their own. They need to be made experienceable for all employees, since norms are always subject to a subjective assessment by each individual.
That’s why artefacts are a further component of a customer-centric culture. Artefacts make the norms experienceable for an organisation’s employees. Capturing and interpreting artefacts place great demands on the individual. Four different artefacts of an organisation need to be distinguished:
- Stories
- Arrangements
- Rituals
- Language
These four artefacts have so far not been systematically examined. Above all, there is hardly any awareness that these four artefacts are connected with one another. Yet artefacts can achieve a far greater effect than other instruments. Stories are now deliberately used in practice under the fashionable term storytelling. Stories can be based on improving the customer centricity of one’s own or another organisation. But beware: Apple, Google, Amazon and AirBnB stories wear off over time and are, for the vast majority of employees, unreachable galaxies. Sharing dreams is fundamentally an important element for motivation, but most organisations have only a kick scooter and not a rocket available for their journey to better customer centricity. It practically brings tears to one’s eyes when Swiss retailers compare themselves with Amazon, where the market potential in one case is over five billion and in the other case just over eight million. So it is important to spread stories about one’s own successes, or those of competitors, succinctly in the organisation.
Besides stories, arrangements in organisations also have an influence on the customer-centric culture. Arrangements are to be understood in this context as physical manifestations. Examples are expensive furniture in the waiting room, a coffee machine that produces high-quality coffee, or customer-interaction rooms that, through the generosity and high quality of the materials used, show: ‘Our customers are important to us.’ Here, arrangements are not to be understood as customer experience or the demand for unnecessarily expensive design elements at customer touchpoints. It is about elements within an organisation that show every employee that the organisation’s customers are important. So the many posters covered in writing in office corridors on the topic of customer centricity are likewise not to be seen as arrangements, because they only describe that customer centricity is important, but do not represent it themselves.
Rituals are a further artefact of a customer-centric culture. Different rituals can be used to improve customer centricity. Examples include customer events or the annual determination of the most customer-centric employee.
As a last artefact, an organisation’s language needs to be taken into account. How often have we experienced in recent years that, in meetings and workshops, the word ‘customer’ was not mentioned even once? How often have managers in workshops repeatedly pointed to costs instead of possible growth potentials? Language, and the frequency with which certain terms are used, has a big influence on the development of a customer-centric culture. It is closely connected with rituals. Rituals can help to change the language in an organisation over time. Some organisations give new employees a glossary of the most important terms when they are hired. Even though we are aware of the longing for simple and clear rules — sorry, these don’t exist, and certainly not in relation to culture. Every organisation and every manager must decide for themselves which elements are expedient and to what extent they help to improve customer centricity. In general, we recommend starting with language, since it concerns everyone, is easy to change, and moves a lot.
We wish you much success in establishing a customer-centric culture.
