Customer-Centricity Can Supercharge Your Success. Here Are 5 Ways To Get It Right.
Better profitability, revenue growth and talent retention — that’s what’s at stake if you neglect your customer experience. While maintaining a tight focus on the customer day after day is easier said than done, it’s critical to success: Forrester found that high-growth companies are 2.5 times more likely to focus on solving customer problems than their peers.
When my cofounders and I started Centric Consulting over two decades ago, we researched all the things people didn’t like about working with consultants. We wanted to be different, designing the customer experience from the ground up to focus entirely on customer happiness — hence the name Centric. That focus has remained our mission and core purpose, guiding our everyday actions to provide unmatched experiences to clients and employees alike.
Below, I share how we achieve that for our clients:
Treating a client’s business like it is our own.
We genuinely want our clients to be successful, and we’re willing to put in the extra work to make that happen. Sometimes, this means offering training, coaching, bootcamps or lunch-and-learns on our own dime. Or in the rare instance a project goes sideways, swallowing the cost and making it right.
“We want clients to feel like we both want the same outcome, and we have their best interests at heart,” says Jeff Lloyd, Centric vice president of strategic growth and operations. “Clients feel that. There are other organizations with the same skills and capabilities. How you bring those skills to bear on their personal needs and how they feel about it is everything. And it’s both super simple and super hard.”
For example, we recently were on the brink of beginning a large data and analytics strategy project with a long-term customer. We planned an all-day working session with them, but the director wanted to cancel because the company had fallen into hard times and no longer had the budget.
“We did it anyway,” says Dion Dunn, Centric vice president and Cincinnati and Louisville practice lead. “They’d been an important customer to us, and we wanted to help them out — we wanted to invest in the long-term relationship.”
Listening to the client before providing solutions.
We can’t solve customer problems without a deep understanding of what’s important to the client, their strategy and how they measure success. It’s important that we listen first, asking more questions than providing quick answers or solutions.
“You have to align your capabilities to the client’s strategy,” says Chad Caldwell, Centric vice president of industry vertical strategy and growth. “You can’t do that if you don’t have a holistic and encompassing understanding of what’s going on in the client environment.”
Operating with integrity and openness.
You can tell a customer you’re acting in their best interest and being upfront, but ultimately words mean nothing without the actions to back them up. We prioritize offering real solutions to clients’ problems over suggesting the work that’s going to net us the biggest budget.
For example, sometimes clients want to replace their enterprise resource planning system, convinced it’s not working for them.
“The first thing I usually ask is if the client is sure it’s not a user problem,” Lloyd says. “If we can optimize things the client already has, it saves them time, money and all the drama that comes with a long implementation process. The client is usually surprised because they think we’re supposed to be selling a system, not helping them figure out how to keep what they’ve already got. It’s all about helping the client, not just chasing revenue.”
We also strive to be vulnerable, admitting mistakes as soon as they occur and taking steps to make them right. “If something goes wrong on a project, you have to be upfront, and do it before the client is even thinking it,” Caldwell says. “Don’t spin the story to make the client pay for it.”
Bringing a human element to business.
We work to build trust throughout a client’s entire organization, making the relationships more than transactional. We know delivering unmatched experiences is inherently personal — what unmatched means varies from person to person.
Lloyd remembers one woman’s surprising answer to what unmatched means to her when interacting with consultants: If somebody would smile and say hello. “She just wanted someone to be human and personable because we’re all equally competent in the skills we bring to the table,” he says. “I promise you, the CEO would have a different answer. As a company, we’re good at thinking in that way genuinely.”
Providing an unmatched experience often leans heavily into that personal element. One consultant, for instance, received a call that his client was going to be late because they had a flat tire. The consultant met her on the side of the road to help change her tire.
“It’s pouring down rain and he’s on his knees,” Dunn says. “And this wasn’t his best friend or a key buyer. This was a teammate from the client side that probably had no influence on whether we stayed there or not. This kind of thing is just built into our DNA at Centric.”
Cultivating a great culture for our own people.
Ninety-six percent of leaders surveyed by Indeed believe prioritizing employee happiness helps retain top talent, and 87% believe employee happiness provides a real competitive advantage.
“Without good, talented people who are engaged and want to do great work for our clients, we don’t succeed,” Dion says. “Supplying the best possible talent to our clients is also part of being customer-centric.”
At Centric, we also strive to create unmatched experiences for our employees. Some of the ways we do this are by promoting work-life balance through flexible work, offering self-managed PTO time and cultivating a culture where we treat people as humans first, no egos allowed. We want to hire and retain the best people. We want to take care of them so they can take care of our clients.
Being customer-centric has been part of our mission from the very beginning, and I believe our success in this area is due to weaving the concepts above into our mission and culture.
“Being customer-centric means don’t oversell, do what you say you’re going to do, be focused on the long term, build genuine relationships, add value, treat their business as your own — super easy to say, extremely hard to do in practice,” Chad says.
Centric Consulting is an international management consulting firm with unmatched in-house expertise in business transformation, hybrid workplace strategy, technology implementation and adoption. Founded in 1999 with a remote workforce, Centric has established a reputation for solving its clients’ toughest problems, delivering tailored solutions, and bringing deeply experienced consultants centered on what’s best for your business.
