Description

Do you even customer, bro? 

A lot of us in CX feel like we end up being the champions of the customer in our orgs, or even the heroes. But that's not a good thing, right? We shouldn't be relying on heroics to make sure that customers have a good experience with us.

The better we are at retaining customers, the better it is for our bottom line (and even our top line, if they expand with us). That's why businesses are obsessed with Net Revenue Retention, Gross Revenue Retention, and churn rates.

So you'd think we'd be better at understanding what actually makes our customers tick, right? But a lot of businesses have a hard time making the leap from looking at NRR, GRR, and churn rates on a spreadsheet to actually understanding what customers are trying to do with our products, what they get value from, how they prefer to interact with us, and what frustrates them.

The antidote to this is to build a truly customer-centric organization. The "bad" news is that it's hard to cultivate that without total leadership buy-in and having customer focus in your DNA. But it's not impossible.

In this episode, we're walking through the signs that show whether a company is customer-centric. You could audit your current company to see how it stacks up, or use this to evaluate a company you're considering joining.

To make this harder, companies often do things that SOUND customer centric but actually aren't, so we're diving into some of those false signals too.

Look for things like:

• Are the company's OKRs and goals customer-centric? How much do they reflect whether you're building for and serving the customer adequately, vs. focusing purely on topline revenue?
• What programs does the company have to capture and represent the voice of the customer in product development? Are they being given lip-service or are you actually developing things that customers find useful?
• Does your release process take customers into account, or are you shipping in a way that doesn't prepare them for success?
• Do end users actually like using your product, or do you mainly develop features that the economic buyer wants, and end users hate?
• How do prioritization decisions get made? Are execs citing actual customer data, or customer names? Or are you hearing more about what [insert name of senior stakeholder] wants?
• Where do teams like Scaled, Digital, Community, and Customer Education sit? In Marketing or in a Customer org?

We get into these, and more, in the episode. But let us know what you think: what are the signs that you think differentiate a truly customer-centric org from one that's not, or just giving it lip service? Or tell us from the POV of businesses where you're the customer! What is your experience like working with orgs who are truly customer-centric vs ones who only claim to be?