What Customer-Centric Really Means:
Seven Key Insights
1. It
goes beyond handling customer calls efficiently. It means
addressing all customer issues fully and resolving them completely.
(1)
2. It's not just ensuring that your support departments regard
front-line workers as their internal customers. It's ensuring that
everyone
adopts an external focus.
3. It involves more than telling your employees how to treat
customers
right. You've got to give employees the authority and tools to
decide
the right way to treat customers.
4. It's not a matter of steering customers through your Web site or
store just the way you envisioned. Customer-centrism means letting
customers interact with your locations just the way they want.
5. It's not just giving customers what they want, it's giving them
what
they will want.
6. It's not organizing the company to serve customers. It's letting
customers determine how you organize.
7. Customer-centrism isn't just about winning new customers from
recommendations of current customers. It's about having customers
say
you should raise your prices.
(1) Harvard Management Update Newsletter (August 2001) offers these seven key insights
