Customer Centric Strategy- A Secret of Business Success

Customer service is the basic building block of any organization’s structure and its success. In addition to financial strategies, human resource strategies, marketing strategies, now customer service strategies also hold a strong position. No doubt customers are considered as heart of any organization, thus everyone is trying to provide quality services to their consumers. In this competitive market, the key to success is to shift to customer centric strategies.

Cherin Kuruvilla CEO Arcane Consultants says,

“Customer service is the life of any business. You can offer promotions; you can bring in as many as you can, but if you don’t bring customers back, then you haven’t done much.”

It seems quite easy to say, but in actual developing a complete customer centricity rather appears to be elusive. Unanticipated challenges, external environmental factors, political situations and other hidden obstacles may put hindrance in transition of an organization to customer centric structure.  In Accenture’s delivering the Promise Study included 75% executives who believed their customer service to be above average. But 59% of customer reported their experience with these companies to be extremely dissatisfying. The potential road block on path while developing such a customer service program can be that an organization fails to determine customer’s need, priorities and their changing demands Companies basically have two types of customers, one is promoters and second one is detractors. A company’s score is defined by its difference between promoters and detractors. In addition to valuing its promoter a company needs to gain insights into how to convert its detractors. Failure to improve customer experience leads to a poorly developed customer service program.

Building Blocks of Customer Centric Strategy

The building blocks of a good customer centric strategy include:

•  Communication

The first and foremost thing is the way of communication with customers. An organization’s staff needs to be polite both verbally and behaviorally while dealing.

• ·         Skilled Staff

The vision of a customer centric approach must include proficiency in technical and soft skills. No doubt staff’s proficiency and skills define the success of a customer service program.

• ·         Accountability

A constant accountability of how effective a customer service strategy is working enables improvements based on customer experience. It helps to turn the detractors into promoters.

In short developing a proper customer centric structure ensures customer loyalty and consequently increases overall revenue.