You’ve developed a culture that leaves the fate of your business in safe hands. In your business, people are the focus. Employees are happy, engaged, and treated with respect. And most importantly, your customers love the experience of buying from or working with you. In this modern landscape, it’s imperative you never take that for granted. 

As you plan for the months and years ahead, staying centered on your customers will be an ongoing challenge, but if you remain diligently focused on the four most influential factors of customer-centricity, you’ll guarantee that your culture never ventures too far off course. These four critical inputs are: leadership, core values, employees, and customers. 

How do these all work together? Leadership sets the example. It’s impossible to be customer-centric unless your executives are all deeply committed to writing the customer genome into the DNA of your business. Customer-centricity is ultimately about behaviors, and those behaviors must first and foremost be modeled by leadership. 

Emergent from those behaviors are core values. While it may seem obvious to leadership, defining core values and the associated behaviors is key to socializing and operationalizing customer-centricity throughout the business. Core values communicate how people in your organization can expect to be treated, and sets expectations for how employees—current and future—should treat people, whether team members or customers. Employees who exemplify your core values are culture fits, and will almost naturally put the customer at the center of everything they do. 

And lastly, we must discuss the customer. It’s not enough to use the language of customer-centricity, and still yet not enough to exalt behaviors that support customer-centricity. Work must be done to understand your customers. Their voice, their desires, their problems—all of these must be understood and then acted upon in meaningful ways, or else customer-centricity by design will fail, and ultimately harm your business.

So, while your business is in a strong place, and the customer genuinely seems to be the reason for everything you do, if that ever begins to wane, return to these four pillars, and you’re sure to stay the course. 

To learn more about the actionable principles of customer-centricity, take a free look inside the new book, Built to Win: Designing a Customer-Centric Culture That Drives Value for Your Business from CX expert Annette Franz. If you would like to learn more about Annette and her experience and philosophy, pick up your copy of the book today. For information on working with Annette, reach out here.

For a collection of Annette’s latest customer-centric thoughts and insights, check out her media page.