Customer Centric Cultures Are Key to Startup Success

Introduction

In today’s competitive abundance of goods, services, and experiences that consumers can choose from, businesses recognize that obsessing over their customers is crucial for long-term success. The cost of churn or losing customers and winning new ones is high, so it’s critical for founders to build a customer-centric culture from the start to establish a loyal customer base and to stand out as a brand. 

A customer-centric culture is founded on the philosophy that customers’ voices are integral to the design, development, and iteration of products and services. Below are practical steps detailing how to build the foundation of this type of culture:

“Know and obsess over thy customers”: Who are your core customers and what are their needs?

To start, figure out what kinds of customers you want to reach, win, and retain, so that you don’t have blinders on when making decisions about key investments and the direction to take your product or service. To do this, you should create “customer personas,” which involves developing detailed profiles of different customer segments based on unique characteristics (e.g. location, age, gender, etc.), behaviors, preferences, and needs. Segmenting and profiling your customer base and getting to know what drives those customers will pay off dividends down the road as you expand your product lines and services. 

Once you have your “personas" created, we suggest creating “customer journey maps,” which help visualize your customers' experience with your products and services. Customer journey maps start by taking a persona and empathetically envisioning how they will use your product from start to finish. They help you determine touchpoints and anticipate barriers to product usage while still in the ideation phase. 

Build a “customer-centric” culture: What can we do internally to impact the customer experience? 

Define and set the tone from the top, as a founder or senior leadership team, around what “customer-centric” means to you and how it applies to your business. Examples of customer-centric mentalities that can be translated into formal company values can sound like, “Customer service is not a department, it’s everyone’s job” or “The purpose of a business is to create a customer who creates customers'' (Sriv Singh). These values can then be operationalized into internal ways of working by:

Treat your employees as you would your customers

As Richard Branson famously said, “Clients do not come first. Employees come first. If you take care of your employees, they will take care of your customers.” As counterintuitive as that might seem, Richard is onto something.

Recent research from Glassdoor found a direct statistical link between employee scores on Glassdoor and customer satisfaction. The higher a company's Glassdoor scores, the higher its customer satisfaction scores. In today's marketplace, employee experience is now seen as a key driver of overall customer experience. 

Setting expectations around how your employees engage with customers

From the moment they have initial contact with a customer(s), to sustaining a consistent level of exceptional service throughout a customer’s journey, it’s important that employees know what exceptional client service looks and feels like, the language to use, etc. Training and, more importantly, the development of your employees are important foundational elements to ensuring everyone is on the same page, which then helps you deliver exceptional client experiences.  

Building an internal structure and process

Design your products and services around “empathy for the customer,” meaning putting oneself in the customers' shoes to genuinely understand their experiences and hurdles they might face while you make key design decisions.

For example, at the job board Indeed, there is an orange-colored chair in every conference room reserved for the phantom “job seeker” to serve as an overt reminder that job seekers should be part of the discussion as strategic decisions are made on their behalf.

Listen to your customers

What can you do to continually improve our products, services, and experiences by using customer feedback? Surveys can be a cost-effective and fast way to collect feedback on customers’ satisfaction and expectations, especially at the start of a new brand, or the re-birth of an old one. For survey use, we suggest these processes which might be useful: 

Incorporate feedback from surveys into the product and services design process

Nothing is more disappointing to a business owner than coming up with and launching a product they thought would be great, only to have the customers dislike or not use the product or service. Incorporating short surveys into the product or service design process doesn't have to be invasive or long. Still, it can tip you off to trends among your customers that may be beneficial to them or a product feature that they actually want. Additionally, feedback from customers might help you uncover things you didn’t think about that are customer needs, therefore working to improve your overall product. 

Send strategic surveys to measure long-term trends in customer satisfaction

Often called “brand tracker surveys,” these are more complex surveys that ask participants about their perceptions of your business in the marketplace compared to your competitors. The often very large nature of these surveys allows you to tap into at scale how well your company is delivering the products and services that your company is claiming to deliver. Metrics from these surveys can be used to assess overall customer satisfaction (“How satisfied are you…”), often called CSAT, as well as the Net Promoter Score (e.g. “On a scale of 0-10, how likely are you to recommend X to a friend or family member?”) In addition, data from these large-scale surveys can be useful for creating even more sophisticated measurements of overall product health, or brand health. 

To further uncover the “why” behind your target audience's feelings towards your product or services, you can conduct more “qualitative” focused research, such as focus groups or 1:1 interviews. Oftentimes, these can be more costly since you are asking customers to sit down with you face-to-face (or virtual) instead of filling out a survey at their own leisure. However, there are advantages to using this kind of research. For instance, qualitative research allows you to:

•  Answer questions about what customers like and dislike in a more detailed way. For example, the interviewer can probe into understanding the drivers and motivations behind responses. 
• Gain deeper insights. Surveys are great at getting a wide range of responses, but you might consider going deeper on important topics to your business. In focus groups, we have seen instances where customers might bounce ideas off one another, thus creating a free-flowing exchange of ideas that helped the product designer enhance the product far more than what they had originally asked the group to consider.

Conclusion

Incorporating customer feedback and empathy into the development and delivery of products and services from the start is not merely a good practice—it’s a crucial strategy for maintaining relevance and competitive advantage in a rapidly changing market. That said, startups that are able to incorporate customer-centricity as a core value into their organizational culture and operations not only set themselves up for success, in terms of designing products or services that customers actually want, they are leaps and bounds ahead of anticipating market changes and customer behavior that even mature companies often struggle with.