When it comes to finding the right approach to make your product or services more relevant and satisfactory to the end client, the approach that a lot of providers use is that of customer centricity. To build your product around the ideas of ease of usage for the client by understanding their needs and grievances is what the core value of customer centric approach. But the books at the best management institute, Indore and other cities of India, will tell you that this just the tip of an iceberg. What customer centricity implies, in reality, is that there needs to be more than just an approach of it. Something that penetrates deeper than just helping a confused or grieved customer on the way.
To be customer centric is much more than an approach; it is a culture that needs to be inculcated at the grass roots level in an organization, and it is a strategy that needs to be carefully thought out way beforehand. Here is how you can better understand it.
Customer Centric Culture
Customer centric is not something that merely applies to that end of the company that is open to customer or client dealing. It is easy to make the sales side of the organization work towards a more customer centric approach. However, that approach is of no help if the inflow of services in their domain has not followed the same principle before, meaning the end product is not customer friendly. This is why, the purpose of customer centric management is to inculcate the habit of creating a product that has the client’s best interest at heart.
For example, the designer will re-imagine the product keeping in mind the ergonomics of it, the manufacturer will keep in mind the ease of assembly, and the marketer will make sure that he portrays the product in the best interests of the customer. And this flow of work will be curated by the manager. The need of the hour is to align the strategy so that the end result is more in line with the expectations and needs of the customer, making it all easy to measure.
Customer Centric Strategy
For a lot of big businesses in the world, the rule of thumb is that the customer comes first. They have scaled to those limits because they were able to rethink and restructure their business from a customer’s point of view. The former CEO of pepsico, Indra Nooyi used to visit the Pepsi outlets herself and encouraged her employees to do the same, in order to understand the needs of the consumer. Another great example of that is Amazon, where the CEO Jeff Bezos was able to kickstart the book business because he was an avid reader himself.
The strategy was always to create a product, or revamp an existing one according to the needs and expectations of the customer. And the best method of doing that was always by putting yourself in the seat of consumer and realizing the loopholes in your system. A number of Top MBA colleges in the world have been laying a lot of stress on the importance of customer centric management in these terms. Only as a customer will you be able to understand what your business needs more.
With the power of customer centric management, anyone can create a super team for their business’s growth. The new age way of getting more boost to your profit now lies in the belief of creating a customer centric culture and strategy on all the levels of work in your organization now.