10 ways to embed Customer Centricity in your organisation

Last months I interviewed over 20 product managers, UX researchers, UX designers and agile coaches from companies like Facebook, Uber and Booking about customer centricity.

To keep improving our program for product teams I wanted to learn their best practices and ideas on customer centricity. How do successful companies get everyone on the customer centric track?

In this article I share 10 key takeaways from my interviews

To me, creating products without customer insights, is called wishful thinking. The better you know your customers, the better you know how to solve their problems worth paying for. And the best solution is worth more. This sounds obvious to me, but it is not obvious for everyone.

People need to see and understand the value of something before they can act to it. So show them the business value of customer centricity. Show them how a customer centric approach can help them and make them more successful in their work.

Customer centricity is only possible when you know what it’s like to be your customer. Let everyone -from C-level up to warehouse workers- stand in your customers’s’ shoes.

Let them feel what it’s like to order diapers when you’re in a rush to the next meeting; experience what 6 minutes waiting on the phone for the support agent feels like; or how having a gluten allergy impacts you life.

To me, creating products without customer insights, is called wishful thinking. The better you know your customers, the better you know how to solve their problems worth paying for. And the best solution is worth more. This sounds obvious to me, but it is not obvious for everyone.

People need to see and understand the value of something before they can act to it. So show them the business value of customer centricity. Show them how a customer centric approach can help them and make them more successful in their work.

It’s always easier to see how someone else could do a better job, than to see how to improve yourself. Let your team work on a case for a morning where they need to help another product team to be more customer centric. For this you need a case with a totally different product, but with similar challenges as your team has at the moment.

This helps your team to approach the challenges without being biased and come up with new ways to gather insights and improve the customer centricity. After this, it’s easier to relate customer centricity to their own situation.

Business people tend to focus on business goals. And that’s a good thing, to some extent. Think about it for a moment: how does the objectives “New product release in May” or “Get 1M revenue in Q1” benefits your customer?

The result of the objectives may concern your customers, but the objective doesn’t say anything about how it positively affects your customers. With these OKRs you focus on the business, not on your customers.

This goes for KPIs as well. How do your customers benefit from a higher conversion rate? Of course you need these numbers, but if you want to shift the focus your organisation to a more customer centric approach, let your team work on KPIs which make your customer happy.

​Decreasing the time-on-task or numbers of interactions with customer support could be interesting KPIs to work on for example.

One customer journey session or Google design sprint doesn’t make you customer centric. Knowing your customer is a continuous process. Do user interviews every sprint, get a weekly report from the CRO team, let someone from your team listen in with support every month and update your customer journey every quarter.

Expensive and time consuming? Not if you keep it small. These recurring activities will bring you more valuable insights, more accurate insights and more up-to-date insights than a yearly usability test in an external lab with eye-tracking. It will cost you less and bring you more.

Involve everyone with gathering customer insights, including the maybe less obvious members like software developers. Everybody likes to create something meaningful and gets energy from seeing that their work makes impact.

Everyone can learn how to interview users and everyone can listen in to a customer support call. By involving the whole team you will get more customer advocates. This results in less discussion in meetings and a clear understanding of what is best for your customers throughout the whole team.

GOOB stands for “Get Out Of the Building”. It’s a simple but deadly effective method to build empathy with your customers coined by Steve Blank. It’s about going where your customers are. Meet them in their office, catch them on the street or join them on an event and interview and observe them.

Believe me, people are more willing to share their story than you think. And you will learn a lot more than you think.

People are like people. They like to be challenged.

Make a playful challenge to encourage the whole team to share customer insights on the day-starts. This will make it fun and keeps the customer on-top-of-mind.