In today’s rapidly evolving business landscape, achieving customer-centric organic growth has become paramount for every organization striving to stay competitive and thrive in their respective industries. A high maturity level of customer-centricity enables more cost-effective initiatives related to recruiting, retaining, and growing the value of more customers; and creating relationships to build trust, loyalty, and advocacy. This, in turn, results in both top and bottom-line benefits including:

Higher and faster revenue growth
Increased profitability
Higher brand equity
Increased shareholder value

Here are some recent data points regarding customer-centricity.

A recent study by Berkley, companies reported a “very mature” level of customer-centricity experienced 2.5X revenue growth by companies reporting a “very mature” level of customer-centricity compared with those reporting their company was “very immature.”
A recent PWC survey found that a consumer’s top reason for leaving a brand is typically related to experience — 37% say it’s because they had a bad experience with the product or service itself.
Research by B2B International found that only 14% of B2B companies are truly customer-centric: That is to say, where the customer experience is deeply ingrained in the company culture. This suggests that B2B organizations have significant work to do to become more customer-focused, but it also highlights an opportunity for B2B firms to differentiate their brands and improve profitability by delivering a superior customer experience.

With a customer-centric approach at the forefront, companies can position themselves as trusted partners, adapt to evolving customer demands, and solidify their market position in an increasingly competitive business landscape.

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7 Ways to Gain Traction to Improve Your Customer-Centricity

The seven factors outlined below serve as a valuable and actionable guide for all CEOs, especially B2B CEOs aiming to build sustainable growth by placing their customers at the core of their strategies. By addressing these critical aspects, your company can tailor your products, services, and overall customer experience, fostering loyalty, driving customer satisfaction, and ultimately accelerating organic growth.

We’ve identified seven factors and the financial value of each that we believe contribute significantly to customer-centric growth. Employ the action steps to make progress on each.

1. Customer Segmentation: The ability to effectively segment your customer base to understand their specific needs, preferences, and behaviors, allowing for targeted marketing and personalized experiences.

Take Action: Implement data-driven customer segmentation strategies to identify distinct customer groups and tailor your marketing, sales, and customer success efforts accordingly.

2. Customer Feedback: Actively seeking customer feedback through surveys, interviews, and other methods to gain insights, identify pain points, and enhance the overall customer experience. Research by Aberdeen Group revealed that companies with effective customer feedback programs retain 55 percent more of their customer base and enjoy almost 10 times greater year-over-year company revenue. Plus, positive customer reviews impact future business. A study by ReviewTrackers found that 94% of customers read online reviews before making a purchase decision.

Take Action: Create structured programs to capture, analyze, and act promptly on customer feedback. Use the feedback to ensure customer-centric decision-making. Establish dedicated teams or roles responsible for ensuring customer success, adoption, and satisfaction throughout the customer journey.

3. Customer Success Management: The Customer Success Association defined customer success management as “a long-term, scientifically engineered, and professionally directed business strategy for maximizing customer and company sustainable proven profitability.” According to the authors of “Leading on the Edge of Chaos”, reducing customer churn by 5% can increase profits by 25-125%.

Take Action: Establish dedicated customer success teams to proactively manage customer relationships, drive adoption, and ensure customer satisfaction, loyalty, and ideally advocacy.

4. Organizational Culture. SHRM believes that “organizational culture sets the context for everything an enterprise does” and that culture affects employee engagement, customer retention, performance, and alignment. A culture that facilitates continuous improvement and high performance has been shown to foster innovation and improve profitability. Gllaup found an 85% net profit increase over a five-year period for companies with a strong organizational culture and that organizations with highly engaged workforces outperform their competitors by 147% in earnings- per share and have 21% percent higher profitability.

Take Action: Ensure greater customer-centricity by creating a culture that addresses customer pain points and optimizes processes, products, and services based on customer feedback. Foster a culture that engages and empowers employees, as engaged employees are more likely to deliver exceptional service and experiences.

5. Exceptional Marketing and Sales Alignment: A MarketingProfs study found that organizations with tightly aligned Marketing and Sales functions enjoyed 36% higher customer retention rates and 38% higher sales win rates. One of the best ways to align Sales and Marketing is around the customer buying journey and to use a buyer intent model to improve alignment and handoffs.

Take Action: Adopt strategies to personalize marketing and sales efforts for high-value accounts, to deepen relationships and drive customer-centric growth. Map and analyze the customer journey to identify touchpoints, pain points, and opportunities for improvement, ensuring a seamless and customer-centric experience.

6. Customer-Centric Measures, Metrics, and KPIs: If you’re going to be customer-centric you will need customer-centric measures to guide decision-making, and to track, monitor and drive performance. Examples of customer-centric measures and key performance indicators (KPIs) include customer share of wallet, customer referral rates, and customer lifetime value (CLV). These measures provide insights into strategies that will increase customer retention and upsell/cross-sell opportunities. By continuously monitoring and measuring customer-centric measures, you can ensure that your strategies are aligned with customer needs, fostering organic growth, and maintaining a customer-centric approach.

Take Action: Establish your customer-centric measures and clear outcomes and action plans to improve customer-centric metrics, implement robust feedback and monitoring systems, and allocate resources towards initiatives that enhance the customer experience. Ensure a seamless and consistent experience across customer touchpoints, including online and offline channels to meet customer expectations and preferences. Offer educational resources, training, and support to help customers maximize the value of products or services, driving customer success and loyalty.

7. Data-Driven Actionable Insights: Agile decision-making requires real-time customer insights, market trend data, and competitive intelligence. Work by McKinsey found that enterprise agility improved financial performance by 20 to 30 percent.

Take Action: Empower teams to make quick decisions based on customer insights. Leverage data and technology to personalize interactions, recommendations, and offerings based on individual customer preferences and behaviors.

Want to stay ahead of the competition? Then you need a customer-centric approach that drives organic growth through understanding, and effectively meeting, the needs of your customers. Let’s talk about how you can address these seven factors.