Implementing Customer-Centric Policies in the Workplace

#CustomerExperience leaders need to split their strategies into deliberate bottom-up and top-down approaches. Many get the bottom-up right, but they struggle with the top-down. Bottom-up strategies focus on improving customer-centric employee behaviors at scale. These approaches include #CX or empathy training for front-line workers, using Voice of Customer feedback to set touchpoint expectations based on customer feedback, and building customer-centric KPIs into individual performance appraisals. But where many CX leaders struggle is often with engaging senior leaders to influence their customer-centric behaviors. It's difficult to influence C-suite behavior, but if you're expected to improve customer-centric culture in the organization, then you cannot avoid this. Top-down strategies start with showing senior leaders how customer satisfaction impacts growth, retention, margin, and lifetime value. It also includes improving CX and VoC reporting to provide more recommendations and actions, not just findings and data. Having discussions with leaders about the importance of financial and non-financial rewards for customer-centric behaviors is another tool in the top-down toolkit. And using personas and journey maps is a vital way to convert customer and touchpoint data into a compelling story of necessary change. Don't rely on dashboards and reports to do the job of top-down CX engagement. Don't count on a couple of positive customer-centric comments from leaders as a sign of meaningful, irreversible support. And do not assume that the fact your CX job exists is evidence of senior leaders' commitment to customer experience. Part of the job for a successful CX leader is to constantly prove the value of customer-centric strategies, influence senior leader priorities, and arm decision-makers with the insight they need to make customer-centric decisions. Don't just empower your frontline workers and assume the job is done. If you aren't building a consistent dialog with executives, you're not only missing an opportunity to make the most significant customer impact but also seeding future problems that can lead to declining support, budget, and resources for customer experience initiatives. Take a comment today to identify or define your top-down and bottom-up CX strategies for 2024. If there's an imbalance, solving that now can lead to better outcomes by the end of this year.

At Ema, we believe that customer focus is more important than executive focus. In many larger organizations, junior team members often feel pressured to prioritize “managing up” — spending the bulk of their time keeping senior executives informed and satisfied. But in a startup like ours, we simply can’t afford to direct our energy inward. We need everyone’s attention focused outward, on creating real value for customers. One of the proudest moments for me is when a more junior colleague declines a 1:1 with me because they’ve got an important meeting with a customer. That’s exactly the culture we want — where each person feels empowered to prioritize what moves the needle for the business, rather than what’s conventionally expected in a corporate hierarchy. Here’s how we work to “de-executive” our culture at Ema: * Empower Prioritization - Everyone has the autonomy to choose the most critical tasks or meetings. If a customer call conflicts with a meeting with me, I want them to take that call. * Flatten the Hierarchy - We minimize layers of approval and emphasize that valuable input can come from anyone — no matter their title or tenure. * Reward Customer-Centric Behavior - We celebrate examples where teammates go the extra mile for a customer, and that includes giving them the freedom to reschedule a 1:1 with a so-called 'executive'. We've banned all executives in the company. * Model the Behavior at the Top - Leadership sets the tone by actively encouraging people to “push back” if it serves customers better. We’re here to support the team, not to create more work for them. By keeping our focus on customers rather than internal politics, we’re building a stronger company and delivering better experiences. And the best part? Our team members feel more empowered, recognized, and fulfilled in their roles. I’m proud of our people-first, customer-first culture at Ema — and I hope this inspires other organizations to rethink how they’re spending their time. Would love to hear from fellow leaders and startups: how do you empower your teams to put customer needs front and center? — #startupculture #customerfirst #leadership #innovation #FutureOfWork

If a SaaS company does everything in its power to ensure the success of its customers (within its financial means, of course), something would have to go catastrophically sideways for the company not to succeed, because retention is always your cheapest form of growth. Given that a SaaS business with 120% net dollar retention could theoretically never win another new logo ever again and still grow 20% year-over-year, all teams should be operating in pursuit of maximizing value realization and mitigating the risk of churn. But despite this well-understood truth, when I ask SaaS executives how they are driving customer centricity in their organizations, I’m usually greeted with trite, yawn-inducing answers such as Slack channels for customer wins and/or product feedback, executive sponsorship programs, and so forth. Building a culture wherein all functional teams are deeply committed to ensuring customer success and accelerating the go-to-market engine requires much more than FYIs and information cascades. To be best-in-class, companies must commit to time-intensive, deliberate, and consistent methods for fostering deep engagement across teams. Organizations that galvanize their teams to share responsibility for customer and commercial success enjoy stronger trust from customers and, in turn, more fruitful financial results. In this month's Tactic Talk installment, I'm excited to share ten low-effort, high-impact tactics to help you build more accountability for customer-centricity across all business functions: 💰 At the leadership level, use the same variable compensation targets irrespective of the function the exec owns 🖱 Bring in technical resources from customers to speak with your sprint teams 💻 Require all managers to shadow the support desk on a regular cadence 📊 Democratize access to NPS and CSAT data 🚌 Bring the bus to BOTH sales meetings and quarterly business reviews 🤝 Build a forum for bringing non-economic buyers together on the customer side 🕰 Celebrate “time to advocacy” as a metric in its own right 📒 Include cross-functional representation in your planning and learning 📩 “Build” (for your teams) in public 💪 Leverage your board members for reinforcement https://lnkd.in/e8CriR-W

🔵 TIFOC Thursday: Time In Front of Customers At Amcor, we believe in TIFOC—because when you're in front of customers, you see the world differently. This week, I came across a powerful reminder of just how important it is to put the customer at the center of everything we do. Ben Goodey’s article, “How to Create a Customer-Centric Culture,” outlines five must-practice principles that every business should consider—and they all reinforce the idea that customer centricity isn’t a role or a department… it’s a mindset and an operating system. Here are a few highlights that stood out: ◾ Facilitate Customer Interactions: Want employees to make better decisions? Let them hear the customer’s voice directly. From Pret A Manger to Airbnb to B2B companies like Adobe, the best organizations create real-time exposure to customer experiences. ◾ Democratize Customer Insights: Customer feedback shouldn’t sit in a silo. When insights are easy to access, everyone—from product to finance to operations—can act with the customer in mind. ◾ Align KPIs with Customer Outcomes: If you want people to care about the customer, measure what matters. Companies like Revolut are doing this well—tying product success directly to the impact on support tickets and satisfaction. ◾ Prove the ROI of Customer Experience: Customer loyalty, retention, and revenue don’t happen by accident. The best teams connect CX metrics (like NPS and CSAT) to business outcomes and build strong business cases for customer-focused investments. ◾ Embed CX in the Org Structure If the customer isn’t at the table where decisions are made, you’re already behind. The most customer-centric organizations make sure CX has a voice in strategy, product, and growth discussions. Whether you're in Sales, R&D, Ops, Finance, or Marketing—TIFOC matters. When we engage with customers directly, we build empathy, uncover better solutions, and drive smarter, more sustainable growth. Big thank you to Ben Goodey for capturing the essence of customer-led business in such a thoughtful, practical way. Highly recommend giving it a read: https://lnkd.in/gwNrqi-C 🦞 Have a favorite video, article, or example that inspired you around customer centricity or time in front of customers? Drop it in the comments—I’d love to check it out. #TIFOC #CustomerCentricity #EmpathyInAction #CustomerExperience #VoiceOfCustomer #CXLeadership #AmcorCares #Leadership #GrowthMindset #TimeInFrontOfCustomers