Pillar 1 of the Customer-Centricity Maturity Model
Strategy & Culture
This area focuses on how well customer-centricity is aligned to the growth strategy of your organisation. It explores what type of culture and mindset the business has, what is the employee experience (EX) within your organisation, how aligned are different departments on customer experience, and whether or not there are senior, influential champions who are advocating a truly customer-led culture.
How will your company score?
The Assessment Points
1.01 Core Business Strategy
To maximise the impact customer centricity can have on the growth of a business,
it simply has to be at the core of a
business’ strategy.
Businesses that have disrupted their marketplace have cultivated a customer-driven culture from the top down, allowing them to evolve not only with the marketplace, but with their customers, too.
1.02 Business Mindset
A business’ mindset dictates its chance of employee engagement, customer centricity and business growth. As more and more businesses are coming in the marketplace, those new and old companies with a ’growth’ mindset are flourishing.
Being less hierarchical, more attuned to one’s customers and more willing to take risks and challenge the status quo leads to a more stimulating workplace and a greater chance of long term success.
1.03 Senior, Influential Champion
Like any strategic objectives within a business, customer-centricity requires a senior, influential champion to tap into the growth potential this company philosophy has.
Striving to have the CEO and C-suite appreciating and championing the strategic value of becoming a truly customer-centric organisation is imperative for long term success.
1.04 Continuous Learning
With the world moving as fast as it is, the only way to meet and surpass expectations is through gaining continuous user behaviour insights and applying the findings throughout the business.
A continuous stream of insights and learnings will allow a business to evolve, optimise and improve its customer proposition and the overall customer experience.
1.05 Product-Led versus Customer-Led
Progressing from where most companies exist – product led – to a place that truly puts both its customers and its employees first, is one of the most important journey’s any company can go on.
The transformation take companies from “what we think and feel our customers want” to “lets find out what our customers want”.
1.06 Cross-Departmental Dynamics
No matter what size a company is, the dynamics and relationship between people from different departments plays a significant role in how the business runs.
Often companies have strained or sometimes non-existent relationships between departments, leading to competing for budget and recognition. This needs to change for a company to flourish.
1.07 Employee Experience (EX)
The saying goes, culture eats strategy for breakfast. The environment in which employees work goes a long way in influencing the overall customer-centricity of the business.
Businesses where employees can work autonomously through the respect and humility of managers and leaders will flourish. Businesses that engage their employees, asking for and valuing their ideas, will flourish.
1.08 Embedding Accessibility
& Inclusive Design
Being customer centric, means creating a business around all of your customers including those with disabilities. If an organisation isn’t listening to its disabled customers or employee’s it’s not truly customer centric.
In addition is it maximising the full potential of the organisation’s products and services by not making them truly inclusive. The value disabled employees bring to the business and the spending power of disabled people (known as the Purple Pound) should not be underestimated.
Make it stand out.
It all begins with an idea. Maybe you want to launch a business. Maybe you want to turn a hobby into something more. Or maybe you have a creative project to share with the world. Whatever it is, the way you tell your story online can make all the difference.
Don’t worry about sounding professional. Sound like you. There are over 1.5 billion websites out there, but your story is what’s going to separate this one from the rest. If you read the words back and don’t hear your own voice in your head, that’s a good sign you still have more work to do.
Be clear, be confident and don’t overthink it. The beauty of your story is that it’s going to continue to evolve and your site can evolve with it. Your goal should be to make it feel right for right now. Later will take care of itself. It always does.
