An interesting fact: while 88% of companies admit that customer outcomes should be at the core of their business models, a mere 15% of C-level executives and sales departments practice a customer-centric approach. Harvard Business Review specialists came to this conclusion while researching details of over 1,000 initiatives on customer-centricity transformation for their new book. The majority of companies focus on finding buyers for their products rather than trying to understand their customers and cater to their needs.
Why is changing your mindset and becoming a customer-centric custom software company crucial? According to Deloitte, businesses that prioritize their customers make 60% more profit than their peers. The Economist Intelligence Unit states that 64% of C-levels who name customer centricity among their chief areas for investment are confident that they surpass their peers in profit. Other benefits of ensuring superb user experiences include improved retention, loyalty, and lifetime value of customers.
International IT company Andersen conducted an interview with Valentin Kuzmenko, Chief Commercial Officer and Vice President of Sales. In this article, he’s sharing practical advice on how to effectively harmonize a company’s vision with its customers’ aspirations, as well as explaining some common mistakes.
3 best practices for improved customer centricity
Interviewer: Valentin, directing every effort to deliver exceptional value to customers is a must for business growth. How do you achieve this?
Valentin: This can be done in three simple steps.
Firstly, the establishment of a customer-centric culture should start with top executives. Every specialist, from a helpdesk agent to a senior manager, should clearly understand what impact their activities have on customer success.
How can this be implemented practically? The company’s budget should include acquiring software programs, holding events, and taking other measures that help improve customer experience. On the top level, decisions should be made to allocate funds to enhancing customer experience.
Even though these investments don’t seem to have an immediate positive effect, they will pay off in the long run. Among their key benefits are increase in sales and customer loyalty rates along with higher employee engagement rates as your teams see their efforts being rewarded.
Your genuine interest in meeting customer needs on the management level can be expressed not only by financing customer-centric activities but also by taking customer opinions into account. Jeff Bezos, for example, symbolically left an empty chair in every meeting, which stood for his care for the users of Amazon’s products and the need to consider them when making decisions.
On other levels, we recommend democratizing company data as much as possible so that everyone is on the same page regarding your company’s projects and customer outcomes. It’s also a good practice to reward specialists who receive positive reviews and significantly contribute to customer success.
Secondly, every solution should be tailored to your customer’s unique business challenges. From receiving the customer’s initial contact form request to analyzing project requirements and actually building custom software or rendering services, every step of collaboration should be tailored to meet your customer’s unique business needs. To achieve this, we at Andersen frequently travel on business to visit our customers’ facilities in person, observe the production process, and better understand their pressing challenges.
Moreover, we make sure that our processes are of ultimate convenience for our prospects and customers. Signing the contract occurs in several clearly defined, transparent steps, and it takes about 10 business days from delivering the first CVs to assigning the chosen specialists to projects. Our enterprise-scale website, though complex, is clearly structured and boasts well-defined user journeys, impeccable performance, and visually appealing designs. Last but not least, we practice iterative Agile development, rapidly reacting to changing project requirements.
Thirdly, you should be continually soliciting feedback and acting upon it. Nurturing a customer-centric culture entails holding a continuous dialogue with your customers to carry out mutually beneficial projects. Customer feedback can come from various channels, including surveys, social media, and more. It’s also crucial to introduce robust analytics throughout customers’ decision-making paths to analyze your offers from the end-user’s perspective and personalize customer journeys. Based on these insights, companies should take action to adjust the ways they communicate and do business.
At Andersen, we went one step further in soliciting customer feedback and developed AI-fueled solutions that help its users improve the quality of customer interactions. Our AI Call Quality Assistant and AI Business Correspondence Assistant monitor employee adherence to scripts in real time, analyze tone and sentiment during communication and suggest improvements, measure customer satisfaction, and more.
3 traps a custom software company can fall into when ensuring customer centricity
Interviewer: What are the common hurdles that stand in the way of companies striving to become truly customer-centric?
Valentin: I’ll name three major challenges.
The first one is Insufficient resources. A software development company can fail to assign the necessary funds or appropriate specialists to a project for various reasons. For instance, its specialists aren’t properly trained, lack the needed qualifications, or don’t have the mastery of the latest technology stacks. As a result, customers might fall behind critical market trends and miss valuable opportunities.
The second one is delivery hurdles. When the responsibilities and roles on the developer’s and customer’s sides are explicitly outlined and there are solid communication channels and experienced project managers in place, teams are productive and deliver impressive results. Conversely, when these things are missing, delivering the required service becomes challenging.
Finally, the third one is flawed prioritization. This can happen when the company isn’t on the same page with the customer regarding strategic goals and product vision. The reasons may vary from inadequate analysis of business requirements and poor reporting to irregular communication and failure to adhere to Agile practices and be flexible to changes. As a result, the customer might fail to enter lucrative markets or earn substantial profits while their technology partner is busy solving less relevant issues.
Interviewer: What are the most effective solutions for these challenges?
Valentin: From my experience, a custom software company can solve the above challenges by having a robust discovery phase in place when the market situation and project requirements are thoroughly analyzed to set the right priorities. Furthermore, it must ensure its talent pool and qualifications are sufficient to address customer priorities through the chosen collaboration model – staff augmentation, product development services, or managed delivery. Ideally, the development should be carried out in iterations to ensure flexibility and customer approval of results at each step.
At Andersen, the company which I represent, we’re continuously improving to tackle challenges and make customer centricity the foundation of our daily operations, driving value and delivering tangible outcomes for our customers.
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