#QuickTopic: ‘Customer Centricity’: what is it to you?
The flashy phrase attached to many noble goals and good intentions for almost every SaaS business out there… ‘we are customer-centric‘. Let’s unpack that a bit.
Software companies often like to say they are doing everything with their customers in mind and for the ultimate benefit of their customers. I find this to be often overrated and at times even hypocritical. I know that no business out there means harm to their customers, or otherwise they wouldn’t exist for long. But not meaning harm and not making decisions that may deliberately impact your customer negatively, doesn’t make you customer-centric out of the box.
At times, businesses seem to forget that they exist solely because their customers made an active choice and decision to buy from them, and that this decision is constantly actively re-evaluated and depends on the collection of customer experiences in every single aspect of their engagement with the business whom they bought from. Your customer’s choice of you, and not of others, is not for granted and is not a given. As a business, you need to constantly deliver delightful customer experiences and, even more importantly, you need to make sure your customers can achieve their desired outcomes with your product or service. The moment you fail to accomplish this, you are going to be replaced.
Now back to customer centricity. As a business, you need to ensure you are growing and this is most often observed through the the growth of your revenue, and in some cases your profitability metrics, depending on your stage of growth; then followed by a bunch of other KPIs and financial metrics. To achieve growth, you need to make decisions to drive the business forward, and these are combinations of product innovation, pricing model considerations, expanding your acquired customer base and adding new customers. The crucial moment is, how you make these decisions and what guides you in making them. This is, in my view, the key determining aspect and the main point of failure of how truly customer-centric you are. How many times, when making important business decisions, do you ask out loud ‘Is this a customer-centric decision?’
The balance here is difficult: on one side, you need to be mindful about sustaining your business and growing, and on the other side, you need to do it without compromising on the customer experience and their ultimate ‘well-being’ and benefit from being your customers. This is what sets the true customer champions apart from the mediocre, faceless businesses. This is where you create raving fans out of your customers. This is also where you can create the right environment for your customers to start leaving you.
The thing is, everyone tries to make the decisions they feel are the right ones, and, as I said above, nobody (or very few) makes intentional decisions that would harm their customers. But companies sometimes use ‘customer-centricity’ in a way that appears almost as if they are trying to make themselves feel better about some of the choices they have decided to make, not really considering the actual impact on customers from those choices. This has nothing to do with being customer-centric, but it diminishes its meaning for the ones that actually put a lot of effort in being it.
One of the often neglected but very important aspects of customer centricity is actually having customer empathy as a business, and what I mean by that is having the ability to truly understand the customer perspective and their experiences, good and bad, with what you are here to offer to them. In practice, this is beyond looking at the data. This is about actually being able to imagine and ‘re-live’ things from the customer’s position and understand where you delight and where you lack – what are the real pains and needs. Your customers’ real pains and needs might not always align with what you think is good for them and what you think they will need – and it takes humility to realize, admit and course-correct that.
I don’t see anything wrong with a company saying ‘We are here for our customers. We have identified things we believe we do really well and customers like. We have also identified things we are lacking and we know these create pains for our customers. We are committing to solving those pains.’ This speaks customer centricity way more humanly and honestly compared to saying the rather easy, often faceless, borderline egocentric and very bold: ‘We are very customer-centric‘. Let’s reserve this title only for the ones that truly deserve it.
