A Customer-Focused Culture

So you want to instill a customer-focused culture throughout your organization? First thing you should know is there are a few different phases of doing this and honestly it is not an overnight project. In fact it could take years to accomplish this depending on your company's commitment level and the types of employees you have been hiring. The first phase is to communicate the company goal of company focus throughout your company. At my present employer, customer focus was one of our top three objectives for 2008 and we had a communication plan in place ready for January 1st. And months before this our customer care tea had been meeting and evaluating which projects we wanted to do in Q1 2008. Based on our experience, here are some things you can do at your company to ensure a truly customer-focused culture:
1. Support at the Senior Levels - Ensure that this is an initiative that starts from the top and rolls down. If your CEO and executive management team don't support this, then it will be really difficult to role out any changes to support this initiative. A company with a CEO that personally exemplifies strong customer commitments and rewards those in the company who also do this, will notice the rest of the employees will begin to do this as well
2. Appoint a senior marketing officer to drive this initiative. Make someone responsible to drive this and then make sure to give them resources, both in headcount and budget to accomplish this goal.
3. Get outside help if you need it. There are consulting firms and survey companies who specialize in this type of work.
4. Review your company's employee reward system Are you rewarding employees for helping to drive customer-focused culture? If not, think about doing this. Reward customer's who support your company's initiative and go the extra mile to help customers.
5. Consider an in-house training program - This is a great opportunity to provide a consistent message and training to your employees who work with customers. It's not just about customer service, it's about customer delight, it's about caring for your customers so they want to buy from you again, and again, and again. As part of this program, you can train them on one consistent way to answer the phone, how to handle escalations, how to follow-up on concerns etc. Truly teach them how to be customer-focused, don't just tell them.
6. Hiring the Right People - I mentioned this earlier, but honestly if you want a customer-focused culture, you need to hire the right people. I was a manager in call centers for eight years and I learned a ton about people and what makes them tick. I learned a lot about who makes good employees. For example, you need to hire team-players, individuals who are passionate about customer delight, employees that are willing to go above and beyond to ensure your customers are taken care of. I am just realizing that I could devote a whole blog article to this topic, so I'll stop for now. I also suggest this could be the most important of all steps because if you hire the right people, anything is possible!
7. Ask, Listen and Respond - Survey your customers, analyze the results and then follow-up on every single concern. As someone who has worked with surveys for many years, I have found the best comments to be the open-ended comments. On every survey, I will ask "What suggestions or feedback do you have to help us serve you better?" The answers are a great insight into what your customers are thinking and how you can help them be happier.

Few more articles on this topic for those of you who want to learn more:
Sustaining a Customer-Focused Culture
Tony Hsieh, CEO of Zappos, provides his 10 tips for building a customer service focused culture.