Being customer-centric means that you have a solid reputation along with the trust and loyalty of your customer. The probability of positive word of mouth is high and there is low all no friction between your customers and employees.
Becoming a customer-centric organization isn’t easy. It impacts the existing processes, forces departmental silos to be broken down, and involves others to add to the experience. Here are five ways to become a customer-centric organization:
#1 Know your customer
With data about your customer held in siloed applications, it’s hard to understand that customer in a unified way. An example is attempting to sell new or add-on products to a customer when they are currently unhappy due to an outstanding issue that you know nothing about. For example, if you worked for a company that offered major appliances and has knew a customer was interested in home automation — your organization could be missing an upselling opportunity if automated appliances weren’t suggested to these customers.
#2 Adapt to change quickly and securely
When COVID-19 came along and lockdowns were instated, people understood that there would be disruption to sales and support. As time passed, it became clear that there were two types of companies — those that adapted and those that didn’t.
One type was unable to change their processes or lacked the initiative to do so. If a customer rang the support line, they would be met with a recording saying that the call centre was closed and to send an email instead. After paying a premium to get the great support that the reviews raved about, you would be left disappointed.
The other types saw it as an opportunity to accelerate their digital evolution. Laptops were provided to call centre staff and calls were routed to workers at home. Chatbots were implemented, emails were routed intelligently to the correct support team.
#3 Your whole company is the support team
When a customer has an issue, they want it resolved. What they don’t want is to have to know the internal workings of your company. In the case of a call centre, they want the person they are talking with to tell them where their order is or how their refund is progressing. In non-customer centric companies, this will involve a call centre agent sending an email to the logistics team, or raising an internal ticket for the finance department. It’s then dependent on the call centre agent to remember to track the progress of the customer’s request.
#4 Build omnichannel interactions
A customer wants to interact with a company in the way they want. Customers now expect to interact with a company through various channels — for example, by using a PC to check store times or placing an order on a mobile device. What makes a company customer-centric is valuing the customers time and enabling seamless interaction flows across all the channels. For example:
- Starting a support request by interacting with a chat bot.
- Automatically flows to an agent chat if it’s complex.
- Seamlessly flowing to a voice call if it’s very complex.
or
- Starting an order online to pick up in store.
- Adding items from the store to the order when at the store.
- Paying for it all in a single transaction.
#5 Keep the relationship alive with innovation
MuleSoft allows changes to add new functionality to be made at pace and securely, allowing the business to innovate at speed. It’s hard for a company to anticipate all the needs of a customer and this is where the ability to allow external developers to use your APIs in an easy and secure way comes in. Allowing third parties to build customer experiences using your exposed processes and data.
Anypoint Community Manager (ACM) allows customized developer portals to be created providing API specification, code snippets, documentation, self-registration, and more for external consumers.
With MuleSoft, you are enabled to make your company stand out by putting your customers’ experience at the forefront, by understanding them better, changing processes to meet their needs, and valuing their time. If the customer has an issue you can ensure the whole company is involved in rectifying it. Finally, you keep them as a customer by allowing others to innovate alongside you in providing new experiences.
Drive customer satisfaction through innovative customer experience — download our whitepaper Cutting-edge customer experiences begin with APIs to learn more.
