How Customer Centric Are You?

Many organizations tout that they listen to their customers and gather customer feedback. These organizations have a good presence in social media and say they have a good understanding of their customers. If you go and ask them, they will be able to tell you why customers buy their product or services.

But is that really being customer centric? Is just listening to the customer and maintaining a knowledge base of customer buying trends enough? Is just implementing customer feedback sufficient to becoming a customer centric organization.



The much sought-after "customer at the center of your ecosystem" is quite achievable if you change your perspective of looking at your products. It is easy for me to say that you should look at your products and services from the customer's perspective… isn't that what all consultants tell us?

While talking about customer centricity of an organization, I look for answers to these 7 questions to measure how customer centric organization really is.

1. Do your KPI reports talk about products /services sold OR customer who provided highest revenue and their segmentation?

Every business measures progress in some derivative of revenue. Whether it is profit or volume, every company has a target where they want to be and track their progress using KPIs. But what KPIs really indicate a customer centric business. If you track your success or failure based on how your products or services are doing in the market, then aren't your products/services the center of your universe? If you keep the customer at the center of your conversations, then some of your key success metrics should track information like revenue from recurring business, revenue from large customers, most valuable customer (across the year and lifetime), most valuable customer segment, etc. I don't want to say that you should not measure your success by overall revenue, we all need to make a profit, but more customer oriented KPIs should also be key to your measure of success.

2. Do your customers sell your products?

Customers will talk about products that they enjoy. Business resulting from customer referrals thus is a great indicator of a customer centric organization. It says that they have done a good job designing their product or service to address what their customers are asking them for.

3. Do your customer feedback forms end up in a filing cabinet?

When a customer fills up a survey or sends you a feedback, what is the process that you follow? Do you get back to the customer in a timely fashion or does the feedback lie in your Feedback mailbox for days, weeks or months? A customer centric organization will get back to the customer quickly (which is made easier now with many social media channels) and go to the extent of involving them (or at least keeping them in the loop) during the implementation of their feedback. You will see that simple notifications such as an upcoming product/release resulting from your feedback go a long way in getting the customer on your side.

4. Do your sales, marketing and support teams give customer feedback?

Where does your customer feedback come from? A more product centric organization will be reactive in their feedback processes. They will wait for the customer to reach out to them. The converse is true about customer centric organizations. These organizations make it a practice from all their customer touch points to "talk" to the customer (as opposed to only "listen" to the customer). People quickly get bored with a monologue, but enjoy a good dialogue.

5. What percentage of customer feedbacks make it to product features or service offerings?

When asked this question, many product managers will say "All" or "Most". If asked specific numbers of feedbacks received and when they were implemented, many will not have the data. The data may be surprising. Similar to a "Chinese whisper", customer feedback is typically lost in the process of getting to the product managers (or it is transformed altogether). Looking at the percentage of feedbacks addressed, the higher this percentage the more customer centric an organization is.

6. What is your customer feedback repeat rate?

Similar, but also quite different, to the above point regarding action on customer feedback is the number of times customers give you the same feedback. If you are doing nothing with it, then this number will be high. If on the other hand, you are actually taking action and addressing these feedback to work with the customer, then this rate is going to be lower.

7. How many customers fill up your surveys?

Surveys have been a much used tool to solicit customer feedback. Though this is getting obsolete with the maturity of Social CRM, it is still a tool that organizations often use. The response rates of surveys are stereotyped as always low. However, if as an organization you have shown your customers that you value their opinions and will action their feedback, I have seen people will be motivated to share their opinion. As humans, we love to give advice. But in a product centric market (which we have been brought up in), customers think "Why waste time giving an opinion which will not matter to the company anyways?"

Try to answer these questions keeping your organization in mind. Are you really as customer centric as you think? I would love to hear your assessments.