Four ways to create a customer-centric culture in your company

Even from among firms that are best defined by the products of their R&D departments and laboratories, it is increasing common to hear an executive state the goal of making his or her company one that is customer-facing. That orientation is laudable. The best companies thoroughly understand their customers and fully incorporate customer insights into their plans and priorities. The challenge is implementing that vision. It’s far easier to profess the desire to be a customer-facing company that it is to actually build such a culture.

 

 

Research into the best practices of suppliers serving business markets has generated a fascinating roster of success stories and horror stories told by customers about their suppliers. While the actual stories span the spectrum of topics and circumstances, at both ends of the spectrum, the focus of these case histories clusters around certain themes. There is an important implication of this clustering for executives in terms of the ways in which businesses must evolve their culture to ensure that their company actually delivers on the promise of being customer-facing.

 

 

In the case of the many highly-positive success stories told by customers about their suppliers, a significant majority involve innovations brought by the supplier to the customer. The word 'innovation', however, must be interpreted in the broadest possible way, reflecting in a dictionary definition sense “the introduction of something new”. The success stories reflect new products, new services, new business systems, new processes, and just about every other dimension of “new” that a business firm can envision. Sometimes the success story involves solving a problem; other times it involves getting ahead of an opportunity. When customers provide their success stories involving innovation, they describe the contributions with phrases like “they helped us get out in front of [some situation]” and “they enabled us to take our performance to a higher level”.