Want to Create Greater Customer Centricity? Start with Customer Language. (Part 1)

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Photo by Dmitry Ratushny on Unsplash

"We want to become a more customer-centric organization." As a customer experience researcher and advisor, I hear that phrase every single week. I suspect you may, too.

Achieving this is, of course, important for brand health and financial success. Customer-centric organizations are eating the world. Amazon, which seeks to “become Earth's most customer-centric company,” is close to capturing half of all US e-commerce dollars. Southwest Airlines, which is dedicated to "the highest quality of customer service delivered with a sense of warmth, friendliness, individual pride and company spirit,” has seen its revenue passenger miles grow 67% in seven years and now possesses a market share virtually equal to the US airline leader, American.

But saying you want to improve customer centricity is easy; achieving it is not. The struggle for many business leaders is that many of the tools to transform company culture are out of their reach. It's easy to recognize, for example, that our primary business KPIs (like revenue, margin, and stock price) are largely disconnected from customer-centric aims (such as customer satisfaction, loyalty, and advocacy), but how many of us get to set our company's top goals and measures?

So how can one individual help to transform their corner of the organization to be more customer-centric? One place to start--and a particularly powerful strategy for marketers--is to begin to use the language of people and not business. Our corporate and marketing vernacular too often obscures the customer and what he or she wants and expects. It alters our perspective, encouraging us to consider the value we wish to extract from customers, not what our customers desire and need from us. The language of marketing and commerce damages rather than cultivates customer centricity.

For example, does your organization have an "engagement strategy" to build "stronger customer bonds?" Are you striving to execute a "content strategy" to make your brand "top of mind?" Do you seek to make "more meaningful connections?" Are you working to foster "more authentic customer relationships?" Chances are, you are so steeped in the lingo of marketing and business you merely nodded in response to each of these questions, but those are merely brand-centric statements obfuscated beneath a thin veneer of customer jargon. Those statements all make perfect sense--from the selfish perspective of your brand.

Now, instead of thinking like a marketing or corporate leader, think like a customer. You have around 500 brands in your life, between your kitchen, bathroom, closets, devices, car, TV, and desk. With how many of those 500 do you want to "engage" today? How many of the 500 do you actively and regularly seek out and make time to read, watch, listen, and consider their "content?" Of those 500, how many do you wish to so preoccupy your thoughts and attention that they push your family, job, friends, hobbies, and health out of the way to become "top of mind?" Honestly, how many of those hundreds of brands will you invest the time and care to "bond" with--to make a "meaningful connection" and have an "authentic relationship?"

To flip the perspective, consider these same questions from the customer viewpoint, and explore how our goals for customer centricity are harmed when we misuse customer language, please continue reading on my Gartner blog.