Nurturing a customer focused
culture is crucial for businesses as it helps achieve higher customer
satisfaction, gain competitive advantage in market and provide exceptional
customer experience. To create a robust customer centric culture requires total
commitment from the management as well as the employees of the company. Changing
the company culture entirely cannot be done overnight but requires a thorough
step-by-step focused approach by the company. Some of the steps that companies
can take to create an efficient customer focused culture include:
Identify Customer Focus areas
Customer focus objectives might
vary with different companies. Hence, companies must first identify those areas
and define what is meant by customer focus for them. The company must clearly
define what customers they want to target, what is meant by customer focus in
different departments of organization, what will be the outcome of the customer
focus in terms of behavior, decisions, approach and what will be the business
benefits. Properly defining customer focus will help to achieve objectives
properly.
Set Goals and Targets
Companies must set goals and
targets to improve the customer focus. They should select goals and targets
that are specific, achievable, measurable, and relevant that will help to take
the customer-focus to next level within the company. Companies must divert
considerable amount of resources and time in achieving these customer focus
goals and senior management and executives must be made accountable for the
results. Companies must ensure that these customer focus goals percolate down
to the lowest level of hierarchy and get visible to every employee.
Involve Everyone
It is very important that companies
realize every single person working with the company about their personal goals
for improving the customer focus and encourage contributions towards achieving
the customer focus goals and targets of the company. Employees must relate
their personal goals with that of the organizations goals to get a clear idea
of what is expected from them.
Companies must also identify and
promote competencies of the employees that aids in enhancing the customer focus
culture in the company. The company must strongly communicate to every employee
about these competencies. The competencies must be elaborated in details for
easy understanding of the Sr. executives, Managers, and Employees and what is
expected from them.
Emphasize on Customer Focus
In order to emphasize on customer
focus, companies need to take help from several learning programs, curriculum, training
programs and more to develop competencies that are deemed crucial for
developing customer focus. Companies must also gauge the impact of the training
programs and resources on developing the proficiency of the employees. Thus,
the resources and training methods that are most effective can be segregated
from others that are not.
Acknowledge achievements
Companies must assess the
performance of employees and competencies on a regular basis and in mean time
also acknowledge achievements for efficient customer focus by means of
performance appraisals, incentives etc. Acknowledging the achievements of the
employees should be a continuous process and not just limited to a single
event. Efficient communication must also be maintained between employees and
managers while acknowledging the achievements of the employees.
Efficient Communication
Companies must ensure that
efficient communication is maintained that promotes customer focus culture. For
building a customer focused culture, it is imperative to communicate
efficiently to continuously highlight customer focus among the workforce.
Having a good customer focused
culture enables companies to have better customer retention, higher revenue,
better customer satisfaction and high referral rates. Creating a customer
focused culture helps companies to better resonate with the market trends and
gain competitive advantage.
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