Customer-centric approach to sustain and flourish

Customer-centric culture is the true long-term accomplishment and sustainability strategy for a profit or non-profit organisation. Conceptually it is about putting the targeted customers at the forefront to ensure their satisfaction. Being customer-focused means demonstrating what the customers want. A happy and satisfied customer group is the key factor to sustain and flourish. It is directly aligned with the institutional mission, vision, and strategic goals. Customer-focused approach is a loyalty-based organisational set up that immensely contributes to strengthening an entity. This should be an enterprise approach for crafting a customer-focused culture driven by the governing board and the top management and must be supported at all levels of an organisation. Resilient customer focus stems from dynamic policies and strategies. 

Customer-centric approach assigns clearly defined accountability to the employees to ensure effective enforcement of the institutional goals. Accelerating customer expectations are driven by the technology, and thus technology adoption and skilled employees can build a strong relationship with the customers. Goals of the customer-centric approach must be very distinct to the strategic group members and to the workforce who are directly responsible to operate activities. All must be aware of their specific roles and understanding of the expected outcome. It is about the group of confident management and employees who clearly understand how their behaviours enable customer satisfaction and loyalty.

The central segment of the customer-centric approach works to win customers' trust and establish long-term relationships. It is about creating loyal customers who might easily be attracted and served at low costs and efforts. The targeted customers must feel valued by the institutional or company efforts. The target clients who do not feel valued are less likely to remain loyal to a good or service provider. Loyal customers are the true promoters for a business and are the most powerful force behind the reputation for service excellence. In the ever-increasing competitive environment, it is the experience of the services by the customers that make a company or a product differentiated.

 Embracing customer-centric approach is a governance issue. The approach is rightly driven by customer-centric leadership. It is the key personnel in the company or institutional helm who must have learning and understanding of customer-focused leadership. Customer-centric leaders can bring out the best in employees, and performing employees are engaged work-force having greater job pleasure. This is a torch-bearing approach that successfully enables an entity to optimise customer and employee satisfaction. In such an environment, institutional arrangements and systems are customer-aligned and it is the engaged workforce that makes this alignment happen. This results in operational efficiencies and improved morale of the employees. The situation has financial implications and opportunities to save costs to maximise benefits and income of any entity.

How to reach the customers' true impression? How to react to the responses of the target customers? In this respect, productive customer listening is a top competitive advantage. Communicating and listening to customers' feedback should be on the priority list of a customer-centric approach. It is about both positive and negative responses. It is crucial to go beyond listening to customer concerns, comments and collecting feedback. There is no doubt that every organisation is different and the feedback received from customers vary. Whatever may be the nature of an organisation, continuous evaluation should be part of the system. Third party and independent evaluation might offer important insight. It is essential to teach employees to be appreciative and respond positively to the negative reaction of the clients. There should be continuous effort to work on up-gradation and rectification to respond to the target clients rightly. 

Covid-19 forced organisations across the globe to change and reassess existing strategies to sustain and flourish. It has become a major challenge for the board and top management of business and other entities to undertake transformation initiatives and an integrated customer-centric approach. The changed approaches are expected to have remarkable implications for customers' preferences and ultimately for sustainability of  businesses and operations. The reality is, the pandemic has remarkably changed the purchasing pattern of the clients. Consumer behaviour changed drastically due to the global pandemic and entrepreneurs and service providers must adapt to the changing expectations to stay relevant. Thus it is time to understand the changing customer behaviour and evolve ways to accommodate the changes.

The ongoing situation is complicated as it is very difficult to understand the future business and economic environment to undertake a solid strategic decision. This new normal creates a critical challenge to identify the answer to several relevant questions: How to keep pace with the continuously changing consumers' lives in this critical time? How to connect with consumers in appropriate ways? What should be the strategic communication mode in the new normal? And a great concern is, how to create meaningful value in peoples' lives?

It appears that the businesses and the service providers need even more customer-centric products and services to satisfy the new normal consumers. In the context of the health crisis, customers are re-examining what they really need in this critical environment, and environmental responsibilities and hygiene issues of the businesses are coming up strongly under scrutiny of the customers. To handle the situation, entrepreneurs and leaders need extensive efforts and research ventures to come up with their workable customer-centric approaches.

Transparency is more important than ever in the context of the Covid-19 crisis. In times of crisis, businesses and other entities need to communicate caringly with customers. Acknowledging customers' circumstances and their challenges is crucial at this moment. It is essential to recognise their emotions and find ways to work with them using different channels and avenues. Technology has already been recognised as probably the most crucial vehicle for communication and transformation.  In the process of realising our future transformation and customer-centric approach, taking advantage of technologies might take us to the desired level of sustainable operation.

There is no doubt the Covid-19 has reshaped and will further change our lives, businesses, and consumption behaviours. Our strategies and approaches will be changed and modified, products might take new shape, targeted customers might also change. However, staying customer-centric amid covid-19 is the must.

Dr. Shah Md Ahsan Habib is a Professor, Bangladesh Institute of Bank Management [email protected]