Customer centricity is to be understood not as a state, but as a continuous improvement process. Improving customer centricity sounds good, but is challenging for many companies. It turns out that the term is frequently not understood correctly. What customer centricity is not can, at first glance (and on LinkedIn), apparently be answered easily. That’s why we developed the Customer Centricity Canvas , so that a uniform understanding can arise in a company of what customer centricity even is, or what it is not.
Improving customer centricity begins, as a first step, with reducing the complexity in steering an organisation for those responsible. Here, improving customer centricity means something different in everyday business for every company. For this purpose, the Customer Centricity Canvas and the Customer Centricity Maturity Check serve as a starting point. The Customer Maturity Check allows those responsible to systematically analyse the strengths and weaknesses of their own company’s customer centricity. Here, the results of the different responsible people can be compared and various assessments critically questioned. The ‘feelings’ regarding the strength of a company’s customer centricity are quantified into clear numbers. The results can then be transferred into the Customer Centricity Canvas and serve as a basis for discussion.
The Maturity Check also helps in uncovering guiding principles that may so far have made it more difficult to improve customer centricity. As already mentioned, improving customer centricity sounds simple, but is a great challenge for every company, since it is a continuous process.
After setting out the strengths and weaknesses, it is important, in a second step, to prioritise them. Here too, the Canvas can help to keep an overview of the existing weaknesses. The prioritisation is extremely subjective, but we have experienced in many companies that the lack of an overview of the existing weaknesses regarding customer centricity presented a considerably bigger problem for successful improvement.
Improving customer centricity usually succeeds by defining a lighthouse project that, on the one hand, eliminates a central weakness regarding customer centricity and, on the other hand, is implementable in a short time. So it is important, in a third step, to define such a lighthouse, which serves as an entry into improving customer centricity. Although the term lighthouse is now already very burnt out in practice, the idea behind it is elementary for improving customer centricity. Possible resistance can best be met with a successful project.
In a further step, the Customer Centricity Canvas also helps to secure learning, or the competency gain, in the company. Through the prioritisation of strengths and weaknesses, it can be precisely determined which competencies the company must improve in the coming years. So the mistake of equating customer centricity with customer experience management can be avoided. Before customer management is changed, the necessary competencies should first be available in the company. Especially in recent years, more and more companies are steered by agencies instead of systematically improving their own competencies.
The reduction by those responsible to individual aspects of customer centricity is to be halted with the approach described. As a result, the company should be put in a position to raise success potentials and to work in a focused way on the really important levers. Improving customer centricity, moreover, also means learning.
