The first powerful customer-centricity quiz insights

Last Autumn, we published a customer-centricity test comprised of 15 questions covering the 5 pillars of customer-centricity. We’ve had 292 responses already and have noticed some interesting trends we thought would be worth sharing!

Tip: Don’t have 5 minutes to read the in-depth analysis? Skip to the bullet-point list of takeaways.

Positive customer-centric trends in leadership and strategy

Overall, we see a positive trend that a majority of organizational leaders are promoting a customer-centric agenda. Over half of respondents said that their leaders are initiating projects and tasks with customers at the starting point and that leaders are empowering their teams to solve customer problems. 

Furthermore, 58% agreed that customer-centricity is a top priority for senior management, and 51% agreed that their company culture is centered around customer needs.

Establish KPIs based on a shared definition of customer-centricity

One area that seems to be more of a challenge for respondents is key performance indicators (KPIs), with 37% saying that their organization does not currently have shared interdepartmental KPIs focused on customer satisfaction.

We will mention here that a slightly lower, yet still significant number (31%), said that their organization was lacking a clear definition for customer-centricity.

In our experience working with brands, it is essential that organizations have a clear and shared definition of what customer-centricity means for them, otherwise, they risk having departments, teams, and individuals working toward different goals. Sharing interdepartmental customer-centric KPIs is one way we have seen businesses successfully mitigate that risk.

Lay the foundation for customer-centric KPIs

• What makes (or would make) your organization customer-centric? 
• What does customer-centricity look like for your business and customers? 
• And how can you measure your efforts around customer-centricity? 

We often see departments and teams determining their own KPIs based on their definition of success. But this can be problematic.

Sure, ad impressions tell marketers that people are seeing their creatives, but are those creatives really serving prospects and customers? And while it’s nice for a call center to reduce average call time, are you sure that those customers aren’t hanging up without their question fully answered, only to require more extensive help further down the road? 

Connecting your customer journey is a great way to dig deeper and get the insights you need to set KPIs that reflect success in the eyes of your customers — throughout the entire journey, not just at a single touchpoint. 

For more on this topic check out our blog post on customer-centric KPIs >>

Businesses may not be leveraging customer-centric tech

Much to our surprise, responses to these questions were noticeably less extreme than those of the other four pillars, with around only 10% willing to strongly agree or disagree on any point. 

In essence: most organizations seem to be somewhere in the middle when it comes to technology and customer-centricity. 

But why? One strong possibility is that many of the respondents answering the questions simply aren’t aware of customer-centric technologies in their organization. While customer journey technology is built to orchestrate journeys across the entire customer journey — and should, therefore, touch the entire organization — we’ve seen that many organizations aren’t yet taking an approach this broad. 

Instead, marketing tends to take on these technologies and focus predominantly on digital customer journeys, bringing in the call center and in-store touchpoints where applicable from a marketing standpoint. Of course, another option is that the technology doesn’t yet exist in your organization. 

Our advice? Investigate.

Ask around and find out which customer-centric technologies are being used across departments and teams. There’s a good chance you already have many of the in-house resources you need to start connecting your customer journey better. If anything, this will start some conversations around the topic and could lead to fruitful interdepartmental collaboration in the future. 

Strategy and Leadership are the foundation, but people make it happen

You can have an excellent strategy and you can have strong leaders, but if your people aren’t thriving and your processes aren’t running smoothly, you’re likely missing the mark — and your customers are noticing. 

Luckily, the responses show some positive trends in these areas. For instance, 59% agreed or strongly agreed that they are encouraged to work together with colleagues in other customer-facing departments. 20% disagreed on this point, leaving the rest with neutral responses.

Interdepartmental collaboration is mission-critical in fully optimizing the customer journey — without the insights and action from teams managing different online and offline touchpoints, any optimizations you make to one part of your customer journey are essentially blind. Just as your organization is a complex web of moving parts, so is your customer’s journey. 

A need exists to increase employee knowledge around the customer journey

To that end, responses do suggest that employees could generally be more knowledgeable when it comes to understanding customers and optimizing their journeys.

Only half of respondents agreed that the people in their organization have the necessary skills to understand customers and personalize content and messages to suit their needs, and 58% were neutral or disagreed that people in their organization are evaluated on their efforts to put the customer first. 

This suggests that while collaboration may be encouraged, there is plenty of room in most organizations to train employees to learn how to address the customer journey better with their work. Of course, this easily weaves back into strategy and leadership — if your leaders emphasize the importance of your customer journey and evaluate everyone based on that, then people will naturally become more intrinsically motivated to develop their skills in this area. 

First 5 takeaways of the customer-centricity quiz, in a row: 

There is a lot more to discuss around both the strategic and operational aspects of customer-centricity. As more folks take the quiz, we will keep an eye on the results and share new findings with you. For now, here are the first 5 big takeaways: 

1. Organizations understand the importance of customer-centricity, and leaders are promoting that agenda.
2. To that end, ask yourself if your business has a clear definition of what customer-centricity means and looks like. Turning customer-centricity into a shared common value can do wonders for your strategy and performance. 
3. Constantly re-evaluate your KPIs and ask if they are really telling you what you need to know: is our customer journey serving each individual customer?
4. Also important to evaluate: your technology. What kinds of tools and platforms are you currently using to improve your customer journey? Does everyone in the organization know about them and understand what they do? Could they be used more widely to address (and connect) additional customer journey touchpoints?
5. Skill sharing is vital. Empower employees to share what they know about your customers and their journeys internally.