Being “customer-oriented” boils down to one idea: helping people. As simplistic as it sounds, this ethos is the key to making it work as an organization.
While there are many skills you need to help customers effectively, theres a more profound outlook that informs the daily actions of customer service all-stars. The core characteristics that make a company customer-oriented add up to the ability to fulfill the ultimate purpose of helping people, regardless of challenges along the way.
In this post, well explore the fundamental concepts of a customer-oriented culture, give some examples of customer-oriented companies and how they function, and break down the steps of how you can encourage a customer-oriented perspective within your team and company.
In today’s highly competitive business landscape, being customer oriented is no longer just an option but an absolute necessity for companies wanting to gain an edge. But what exactly does it mean to be customer oriented?
In simple terms, being customer oriented means making customers and their needs the central focus of your business. It involves creating a positive customer experience at every touchpoint and interaction.
Adopting a customer-first mindset requires commitment from the entire organization. When done right, it leads to higher satisfaction, loyalty and growth.
This comprehensive guide covers:
- The meaning of customer orientation
- Benefits of being customer focused
- Areas to focus on to improve customer centricity
- Tips for training staff to be more customer oriented
- Signs you have a strong customer orientation
- Potential drawbacks to watch out for
Let’s examine each of these areas in detail.
What Is Customer Orientation?
Customer orientation refers to the extent to which a company strategizes, operates and makes decisions based on customer needs, preferences and expectations The customers’ interest takes center stage in all activities
It represents a business philosophy that regards satisfying customers as the best route to growth and success. Efforts are aimed at creating positive experiences that delight the customer at each interaction.
Some key aspects of being customer oriented include:
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Understanding Customers – Researching to gain customer insights, anticipate needs and determine satisfaction levels.
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Customer Focus – Aligning organizational priorities, resources and workflows to optimize customer value.
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Responsiveness – Acting quickly to resolve customer issues and fulfill requests.
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Personalization – Tailoring offerings and communications to individual customer requirements.
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Feedback – Continuously seeking customer opinions and addressing pain points.
Adopting such an outside-in perspective ultimately makes customers feel valued. This drives higher engagement, loyalty and referrals.
Why Be Customer Centric?
Here are some powerful reasons why a customer-first approach should be embraced:
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Enhances competitiveness – A great customer experience becomes a key differentiator from competitors.
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Improves retention – Customer-centric brands enjoy higher repurchase rates and customer lifetime value.
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Drives referrals – Satisfied customers refer others, providing free and effective marketing.
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Creates advocates – Loyal customers become vocal advocates and defend the brand online.
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Lowers cost – Focusing on customer needs avoids wasteful expenditure.
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Enables innovation – Customer closeness reveals new product opportunities.
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Builds trust – Consistently meeting customer expectations establishes trust.
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Earns recognition – Leading customer service organizations rank highly in awards.
Delivering an outstanding customer-focused experience clearly has tangible business benefits. The long-term gains outweigh any short-term costs.
How To Develop A Customer-First Mindset
Becoming truly customer centric requires organization-wide commitment. Companies must align policies, processes and people to the same purpose. Some key areas to emphasize include:
Customer Understanding
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Do in-depth research on your customers‘ needs, values and expectations.
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Analyze customer data to uncover usage patterns and requirements.
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Survey customer satisfaction across all service touchpoints.
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Solicit and act on customer reviews and feedback.
Customer Focus
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Set goals and KPIs that track customer satisfaction metrics.
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Train staff thoroughly on ideal customer service standards.
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Reward and recognize employees who deliver outstanding service.
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Review policies and remove any customer friction points.
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Share customer insights cross-functionally to inform decision making.
Convenience
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Offer multiple purchase and contact options for customer convenience.
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Provide knowledgeable and prompt customer service via phone, chat, email.
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Enable quick and easy returns or refunds.
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Resolve complaints on first contact whenever feasible.
Making customers’ lives easier shows you care about service, not just sales.
Personalization
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Use CRM data to segment customers and personalize engagement.
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Create tailored offers and communications matching customer interests.
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Train service reps to greet customers by name and reference past interactions.
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Offer self-service account management for individual preferences.
Innovation
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Involve customers in product development and testing.
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Analyze customer feedback to spearhead improvements.
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Obsess over customer experience during service design.
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Co-create value with customers rather than just responding.
Mastering these focus areas ensures you stay connected with changing customer expectations.
How To Develop A Customer Service Culture
Here are some tips to ingrain stellar customer service across your organizational culture:
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Lead from the top – Senior management must exemplify customer-centric values for others to embrace.
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Set clear expectations – Define quality standards, best practices and customer-focused behaviors desired.
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Empower employees – Give frontline staff sufficient authority, training and resources to solve customer issues.
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Foster collaboration – Break down silos so teams work cooperatively to deliver seamless service.
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Align incentives – Link employee rewards and advancement to customer service KPIs. Praise behaviors that exceed customer expectations.
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Solicit feedback – Have managers regularly engage with employees to get their input for improving tools, processes and training needed to boost service quality.
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Highlight benefits – Share stories, videos and case studies showcasing the business impact of delivering superior customer experiences.
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Make it meaningful – Connect employees to the company purpose and how their role helps fulfill it. When service staff feel their work matters, engagement follows.
With continuous reinforcement, exceptional service becomes integral to your corporate DNA.
Signs You Have A Strong Customer Focus
How can you assess if your business has truly embraced customer centricity? Some positive indicators include:
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Customers refer your brand to others and give positive reviews.
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Customer satisfaction, retention and lifetime value metrics are high and rising.
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Service interactions are positive, devoid of friction and resolve issues swiftly.
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Customer feedback is regularly sought and drives product/service improvements.
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Employees exhibit care, professionalism and ownership when serving customers.
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Customer needs are prioritized in decision making – from C-Suite to frontline.
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Innovation pipeline reflects understanding of evolving customer expectations.
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Marketing content, tools and channels show intimate customer knowledge.
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Self-service options, support resources and access flexibility ease customer efforts.
While such evidence points to a robust customer focus, companies must guard against complacency. Meeting expectations is not enough – exceeding them in ways that surprise and delight should be the goal.
Potential Perils of Being Overly Customer Oriented
There are also some downsides of taking an extremely customer-centric posture:
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Business decisions driven purely by customer opinions may deviate from company’s core competencies and strategy.
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Excessive customization and flexibility for customers can increase costs and lower efficiency over time.
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Trying to satisfy every customer expectation could leave some needs unmet in attempt to please all.
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Employees may feel unfairly pressured by extremely demanding customers if companies over-emphasize the “customer is always right” motto.
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Focusing too narrowly on existing customers may blindside you to disruption from new competitors.
The goal should be finding the right balance between customer obsession and business objectives. Customer orientation must align with long-term strategic goals rather than narrowly chase every short-term customer demand.
Adopting a customer-first mindset has become a key business imperative today. While challenging, the rewards of higher growth, profitability, and loyalty make it hugely worthwhile.
Success requires complete buy-in across the organization to embed customer centricity into workflows, processes and culture. This cannot be a one-off initiative.
Companies who invest diligently to understand, serve and delight customers reap the benefits for years to come. In contrast, those who fail to respond to changing consumer expectations face declining relevance.
By aligning operations around maximizing customer value and experiences, forward-thinking brands position themselves to thrive amid ever-increasing competition. The principles may remain constant, but techniques to enhance customer orientation must keep evolving. Companies who embrace this transformation will gain a distinct edge.
5 examples of customer orientation
Now that you understand what it means to be customer-oriented, how about seeing some companies that put it into practice? Here are five examples of customer orientation and how it plays out with big-name companies.
Apple preemptively understands customer needs and builds for them. Take, for example, the iPod. There were similar products on the market at the time of its release, but most of them only could hold 30 or 40 songs. For most users, who were only familiar with the Walkman or portable CD players, that was sufficient.
The iPod started at 5GB of capacity and could hold 1,000 songs. It was mind-boggling, but it was exactly what people needed, without them even knowing to ask.
Not only does Apple demonstrate customer orientation through product development, but their in-store and online purchasing experiences also reflect it.
Apple encourages its employees to understand the “why” behind the purchase a customer is making. Instead of customers just coming in, choosing a computer, and leaving, Apple employees engage in conversation or “discovery” with customers during the buying process.
Apple store employees strive to understand exactly what the customer is looking to accomplish so they can leave with the best device for their needs. Its not about making more money; its about crafting a more perfect, customized experience for each person who walks through the door.
Intel wasnt always the household name that it is today. In fact, up until the early 2000s, they were the underdog and relied heavily on being the “best product” rather than the product that met peoples needs.
They started losing out to more creative and flexible brands, like Apple, which understood more about what the end-user was doing with the machine. Rather than being prescriptive, they conducted an extensive study around business use cases and how they pertained to changing customer needs.
They went from being a company known for its excellent engineering and top-of-the-line products to being more flexible and considering more user experience aspects, like paying attention to which industry the buyer worked in, what theyd commonly be doing with the device, and even the budget they worked with.
Ritz Carlton has written books on how to do customer experience well.
There are tons of customer anecdotes about the lengths that Ritz Carlton employees have gone to in order to make them feel cared for — everything from taking notes in their internal CRM about breakfast preferences and favorite wines to noting significant anniversaries like weddings or births.
Its not just about taking note of these things, though. The company empowers its employees to act on them.
Ritz Carlton grants every employee the option to use up to $2,000 per incident to resolve issues. Note that it is “per issue,” not “per customer” or “per stay.” Theoretically, an employee of Ritz Carlton could use this benefit multiple times in the same day for a single customer if various issues needed to be resolved.
Being customer-oriented isn’t just about knowing your customers; it’s also about empowering your employees to act on that knowledge.
When thinking about customer orientation, its unlikely that this motorcycle company is one of the first that would come to mind. The fact is, though, that Harley Davidson knows how important it is to be customer-focused, especially if they hope to retain their place of excellence in the motorcycle world.
This level of care and attention to detail is represented nowhere better than in their interview process. Individuals hoping to get a job at Harley Davidson need to prove that they have knowledge and understanding of the inner workings of the bike itself, but they are also tested on their knowledge of Harley Davidson bikes in general.
The company hires people who have used their products because they are most likely to understand and be able to explain what prospective customers find meaningful and valuable.
In the 1980s, UPS started feeling the heat as alternative competitors to their brand began popping up. Customers simultaneously experienced more shipping needs and more available shipping options, which meant UPS had to differentiate.
To understand how they had to shift and where their customers found the most value, the company had to dive deep.
It ultimately developed 15 cross-functional teams tasked with creating solutions to problems faced by the companys largest customers. Those cross-functional teams ended up morphing into a whole new segment for UPSs business: professional services.
One of the best signs of customer orientation is shifting your business strategy to address your customers current needs.
Cultivate high levels of empathy
Knowing how to help customers depends on your ability to empathize with their challenges. If you can understand how they feel, you can help them feel better, which is an essential part of a customer service job. Even when theres no quick fix, a dose of care, concern, and understanding can go a long way.
Gareth Goh at InsightSquared notes, “Customer service cant always deliver solutions, but it can always deliver empathy.”
Being empathetic means cushioning a “no” or an “I cant help you here” with more thoughtful dialogue. For example, if youre on the phone with a disgruntled customer and you need to transfer them, imagine how they would feel and speak to that.
Unempathetic response: “Im going to put you on hold and then transfer you, OK?”
Empathetic response: “That must be frustrating for you. Im going to connect you with a specialist who is the best person to fix this issue. Her name is Susan, and she knows youre on the line.”
When employees practice empathy for customers in every aspect of their work (whether directly related to customer service or not), they are a part of an organization built on meaningful relationships that stand the test of time.
Why do we need to be customer-oriented?
What does it mean to be customer oriented?
What does it mean to be customer-oriented? Being customer-oriented means a business operates around the wants and needs of its customers, using tools like customer feedback to improve its public image and provide value to consumers. Brands that focus on helping customers may achieve greater loyalty and experience higher employee satisfaction.
What is a customer oriented culture?
Customer-oriented companies understand that the business won’t thrive unless it consistently improves customer focus. It’s a way of thinking that aligns your business goals with your customers’ goals. Building a customer-oriented culture means recognizing that customers are the business.
What is a customer oriented business model?
Adopting a customer-oriented business model is an essential piece of the puzzle to succeed in the competitive marketplace. Here are the main points to remember: Customer orientation boils down to aligning your business goals with those of your customers. The approach involves a deep understanding of customers’ needs and wants.
What are the benefits of a customer oriented approach?
We review the benefits of this method and offer examples of companies that use this approach. What does it mean to be customer-oriented? Being customer-oriented means a business operates around the wants and needs of its customers, using tools like customer feedback to improve its public image and provide value to consumers.
