Customer-centricity means keeping the customer in mind in everything your team does. After all, they’re the reason your company exists.

Easier said than done, though, right? We know how daily priorities can take over and before you know it, the team has lost sight of who they're serving. Quickly, customer experience can start to decline.

That’s why we came up with a few simple ways for every team member to make customer-centricity a habit.

3 Ways to Make Customer-Centricity a Habit

1) Regularly ask questions about your customers

There’s probably a lot of information about the customer living within your company and maybe a few too many assumptions to go with it. Don’t forget to get fresh insights regularly. Otherwise, you might find yourself solving the wrong problems or missing the mark on their needs. 

Ask questions in team meetings. What do they want? How might they have changed? How has the world changed around them? Who are you missing? Start with what you think then go out and ask your customers directly; see how well your ideas and their voices align.

2) Create customer-centric processes

Don’t wait until the customer has a problem to hear them out. Make space for their voices in processes like goal-setting, scoping, and product briefs. This might mean adding steps that center them or even spearheading new customer research. These don’t have to be massive investments or large-scale initiatives. There are plenty of small ways to get the customer voice into the mix. By revising processes, you can make sure the shift toward customer-centricity sticks.

3) Connect with your customer

Customers can sometimes feel like abstract concepts, especially for roles that are not customer-facing. Find ways to regularly humanize the person behind the word “customer”. Ask your customer-facing colleagues to share some stories from recent interactions or, even better, take a few hours to shadow them to hear for yourself. At your next meeting, add an extra chair to the table as a reminder to keep the customer in the room. Remember, customer-centricity is about creating relationships, not transactions.

Step by step, we can all do better for the people we serve. We know that delivering excellent customer experience is tricky. But, by researching, listening, and connecting with them, we can stand out from the crowd.

Do you have the tools you need to get there? Here’s a good place to start.