Creating a Customer-Centric Culture

John Cushman of AT&T spoke Tuesday at the Total Customer Experience Leadership Conference about creating a company culture centered around the customer. His steps for finding how to best serve your customer: watch your customers, understand their differences, set the foundation to building a roadmap to customer-centric success, make each player’s role clear, encourage employees to work together toward a common goal, rethink empowerment, track diverse success metrics, and prepare for the unexpected.

Pay attention to feedback and market analysis. This will show you what your customers truly want. Divide your customers into segments and find what requirements each needs. Make sure employees know what part they have in ensuring the right experience and encourage them to work together. Give authority to the right people in the right situations. Compile systems-provided data, structured feedback, and unstructured feedback to assess your current situation, then improve it. And always prepare for the unexpected.

Build for the end user. Sweat the little details of the user experience to solve pain points. All this will help you know your customers and discover what they want and what they don’t know they want.