Video: How To Move From A Product-Centric to A Customer-Centric Organisation

Companies are increasingly seeing the value of adopting a customer-centric approach and putting their customers at the heart of all they do. In this video series, Wonderflow’s Bram Weerts will share helpful tips on how to move from being a product-centric company to a customer-centric one.

What we will cover:

1. What is customer-centricity
2. What is product-centricity
3. How do product-centric companies differ from customer-centric ones
4. The steps necessary to make the shift to a customer-centric organization

If you’re currently working in a product-centric organisation, but you’d like to move towards adopting a more customer-centric approach, this means radically changing how your company is engineered, in areas such as design, structure, processes, metrics and even incentives.

In this section, we discuss three things that you can do to help your company become more customer-centric.

If you haven’t already done so, start collecting all the data you need to segment your customers, and learn more about each segment. We also recommend creating detailed buyer personas (for example, check out Hubspot’s templates), so that you have a more thorough, intimate understanding of your customers.

Here, it isn’t enough to know basic demographic information about your customers, such as their age range, geographical location, job titles, etc. You’ll want to do a deep dive to understand what motivates our customers, what challenges they’re facing at work, and more. This will help you align yourself with your customers, and tailor your messaging to be more relevant to them.

The next step is to speak to your team, and to impress upon them the importance of being customer-centric. Here, the best companies steer clear of micro-managing, and give their employees the autonomy to fix or improve their customers’ experience.

As shared in our blog post on building a customer-centric culture, The Ritz-Carlton encourages its employees to do whatever they need to give their guests a better experience; the hotel chain even lets employees spend up to $2,000 per guest to achieve this.

The rationale behind this? Sometimes the most delightful “wow” moments happen in the blink of an eye — and if your employees need to wade through a ton of red tape to do something for a customer, these moments could be lost forever.

Finally, considering setting up some sort of incentive scheme or program to reward employees who prioritize your customers.

For example, if a customer writes in to praise Employee A for something they’ve done, you might choose to publicly commend them in a team meeting, and/or provide them with a reward ($20 Starbucks voucher, let them work from home for a day, etc). This helps to move the focus from short-term results (deals closed, sales revenue, etc) to bigger, more long-term goals.

From here, pick a few strategies to experiment with, and implement the changes. Keep tracking feedback as you do so, and monitor customer sentiment to see if your customers’ satisfaction levels rise or drop. Don’t forget to communicate and advertise the changes to your customers as well — they’ll be happy that you took their feedback into consideration, and updated your product/offering based on said feedback!