Customer-centricity is important for any organization’s culture. It is necessary to grow in a long-lasting, sustainable manner. Customer-centric DNA means the person needs to have the qualities or features that fundamentally keep the customer at the center of every action. A customer-centric DNA is when the focus of your company is customer success. Top brands like Ikea, Amazon, and Google take customer success seriously.
This is because business growth can be shouldered on a well-designed customer success strategy. Customer experience and customer interactions need to be chalked in the right manner to enhance customer-centric culture.
10 Tips for B2B SaaS Businesses to build a Customer-Centric DNA
For a B2B SaaS business to build customer centricity, the key is to ensure certain tips are followed. These tips will make the process and transition smoother.
Customer Insights are the Key
Customer-centric organizations must understand the customer through data and insights. They need to know what the customer wants, who they are, their preferences, and their experiences. Understanding customer interactions will identify patterns and threads that can be useful. You can know spots of trouble and track them. These insights will help manage and measure customer success efforts. Customer insights will help chalk the perfect customer success strategy.
Start from the smallest level
Everything starts from the smallest grain. It is important to establish customer success at all levels of the organization. Teams like sales, marketing, management, finance, technology, and others need to focus on the vision with respect to customer satisfaction. This alone will allow them to look from a customer-specific focus. The company then needs to coordinate all these roles to create processes that handle and manage customer success operations. In short, every team needs to look at what defines customer success and keep the larger picture in mind.
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Have a plan in place
B2B SaaS companies need to have a strategic plan in place. This plan needs to be aligned with the company’s goals. The mission of the company needs to reflect how committed they are to customer success. A plan needs to include details of how customer insights are weaved into customer success operations. The customer success strategy needs to include how the company plans to sustain the competition by keeping customers invested. A well-outlined plan will help stick to patterns of growth and customer interaction.
Employee Engagement
Employee engagement is necessary to enhance the quality of customer experience. To build a customer-centric company, employees need to be trained to handle customers. Employees need to know how their departments are connected with customer success. Employees need to understand better customer success, customer touchpoints, and customer lifecycle. Real-time insights and perspectives on customer satisfaction will help employees manage their decisions better.
Involve senior leadership
The C-suite executives need to be all-in-one customer centricity. The senior leadership of a B2B SaaS company needs to be all hands-on with customer success. They need to lead every team to success and be responsible for understanding the customer angle. With C-Suite executives being at the helm of all events, customer success strategies need to entwine CS into all departments. C-Suite leaders must keep the customers at the core of their plans and processes.
Design the customer experience
Design the customer experience strategy for every team. Sales teams deal with prospective customers, and hence their experience is important. Companies can optimize the customer experience across the customer journey with a good CX design. A good customer experience ensures that the customer is happy with the product and brand. You must do that with customer personas, mapping, customer insights, customer profiles, mapping with stakeholders, and outlining the customer journey.
Empower front-facing staff
Empowering frontline staff is necessary to comprehend the impact of actions on customers. Your frontline staff needs to be sensitized on how to treat customers and what style of relationship they seek to establish. They need to have the information and tools to meet customer demands. These processes are built around frameworks that improve customer experience. For example- Creating a set of tools and processes that will help them make decisions with technology. This can help if they cannot take a call on something. Another way to look at it is by identifying environments where customers thrive. Making the process of customer communication simple will drive the right behavior.
Measure for customer-centricity
Measuring as per the right metrics is important to know how the business functions. You can create an environment that promotes learning and continuous improvement. Metrics like NPS, CSAT, CLV, and more will help you understand how the business works. Customer operations can be understood in a better manner and built around impact. These customer success metrics are focused on customer needs and key touchpoints. The right metrics are important for any impact understanding.
Feedback for success
Customers are now poised to give feedback in two ways- direct and indirect. Direct feedback is through traditional channels, surveys, campaigns, etc. Indirect feedback is through social media, comments, likes, etc. Companies can understand what changes they need to make and how they can respond. This Voice of Customer is a great way to understand the customer’s psyche and their view. You can know the real difference in certain opportunities and escalate them to manage risks and challenges.
Rewards and recognition
Rewards are a great way to shape behaviors around customer-centricity. You can notice what activities and actions will help chart the course of the customer success strategy. Teams need to know what drives a behavior change and why it should be rewarded. Using a blend of customer feedback with processes can motivate employees to perform customer-centric actions. For example- If employees have created one wow moment for customers, they can be rewarded immediately to enhance their understanding and show appreciation. Customer experience improvements can happen using monetary or non-monetary processes to enforce customer loyalty.
Bottom Line
Customer centricity is important for any company, and driving it requires collaboration and commitment. Top leaders need to know that customers are the crucial keys to organization success. Alignment at the top level with these tips in mind will help enhance the customer experience. Customer centricity is a core value that any organization needs to imbibe into its core culture.
Shivani is a talented CS manager with the skillsets to elicit, scope and manage end-to-end B2B SaaS project delivery. She has a keen interest in depicting her learnings in customer success by writing resourceful blogs and articles.
Published April 04, 2022, Updated March 02, 2023
