Customer centricity: How to create a strategy that drives loyalty

Imagine wearily checking into your hotel after a long, stressful flight, only to find an out-of-order elevator, which forces you to lug your bags up several flights of stairs…and then your room key doesn’t work.

Now, re-imagine the scenario, except this time:

• The elevator works.

• The clerk delivers your luggage to your room.

• You conveniently use the hotel’s app to unlock your room door.

• You find complimentary snacks—complete with a handwritten note from the hotel staff—on your bedside table.

Like the hotel in the second scenario, a business delights consumers when it prioritizes their needs and anticipates their expectations. That’s what customer centricity is all about: putting the customer at the center of every decision to create seamless, thoughtful experiences.

When you build your strategy around your customers’ happiness, you’ll earn their loyalty and long-term business. In this article, we’ll show you how to make that happen.

More in this guide:

• Why customer centricity matters for your business
• Key challenges of achieving customer-centricity
• How to measure customer centricity
• 7 steps to improve customer-centricity
• Frequently asked questions
• Customer story module
• Put customer centricity into practice

Why customer centricity matters for your business

Customer centricity keeps brands focused on what their audience wants. If consumer behavior shifts, no biggie—the company adapts its products and operations to meet demand. If you evolve correctly, you’ll see major business improvements.

Design better products around customer needs

When you understand your type of customers and their needs, you’re better positioned to build products customers love.

In the past, many business leaders opted for product centricity, an approach that prioritizes enhancing products regardless of demand. This mindset can lead to high-quality products, but not necessarily innovative ones.

Consider portable music players. Sony could’ve kept upgrading the Walkman, and Apple could’ve kept refining the iPod. However, once smartphones arrived with audio apps, the market found a new way to listen to music, and improving the portable music player became obsolete.

Increase customer loyalty with memorable experiences

Unique products attract buyers to brands, but the products alone aren’t enough to foster customer loyalty. Companies that take a customer-centric approach and create great experiences around their products will see the lowest rates of customer churn.

Say you download an audio app to listen to music on your phone. But what happens if a similar app comes along?

To keep you around, the app company can personalize your experience by sending weekly music recommendations, pre-built playlists, or new music based on your listening preferences. That kind of tailored experience is what today’s customers expect, and AI helps deliver it at scale. Businesses that leverage AI to embrace personalization can create more meaningful experiences that drive long-term loyalty. 

Use customer feedback to improve operations

Customer-centric brands look forward to customer feedback. Asking consumers for input can help you adapt your operations to better meet their needs and help you improve your product and customer experience strategy.

Imagine your support agents report an uptick in callers asking for help with a certain app feature. To ease the strain on your agents, you can create a series of “how-to” videos addressing pain points and include links to them in every app download confirmation email, newsletter, or in-app message.

Key challenges of achieving customer centricity

Customers are spoiled with choices and will stick with companies that prioritize their wants and needs. Every business strives to reach various customer service objectives, but may not completely understand how closely linked customer centricity is to achieving those goals.

Here are a few challenges companies might face on the path to becoming more customer-centric.

Getting leadership buy-in for customer centricity

Building a customer-centric culture is crucial for any company aiming to become customer-centric, and it starts at the top.

Companies that have been around for a long time tend to be less comfortable disrupting the status quo and evolving their mindset with the changing times.

Top management sometimes makes decisions based on metrics and ROI—which doesn’t always exist for certain areas of the customer experience—and can keep them skeptical about making changes. Without commitment at the top, businesses will fail to embrace a new company culture and put good customer experience at risk.

Adapting to new customer messaging behaviors

Customers are increasingly turning to social messaging apps to connect with companies, and customer-centric organizations have noticed.

According to Zendesk benchmark data, over 70 percent of consumers expect conversational care that eliminates hassles, like repeating themselves to different agents. Simply put: customers want to have an easy, seamless conversational experience.

As conversational customer service continues to rise, companies need to evolve with social messaging trends to meet customers where they are.

Dealing with ineffective technology platforms

Some businesses might understand what it takes to become customer-centric, but they don’t have the tools or technology in place to integrate customer centricity into their operations.

Giving agents the tools they need and improving the employee experience results in faster response times and good customer service.

Investing in a CRM that includes innovative features—like artificial intelligence (AI), seamless channel switching, and enhanced customer visibility—improves the customer and employee experience.

How to measure customer centricity

There is no magic number to measure customer centricity. But you can use the following metrics to paint a holistic picture of how well you’re basing business decisions on your customers and their needs.

Track customer satisfaction score (CSAT)

Customer satisfaction score (CSAT) gauges the quality of customer service and product experiences, making it a good starting point for measuring customer centricity.

How to measure CSAT:

• Send a survey: Deliver a survey via SMS, email, or chat as soon as a customer support interaction ends. Ask the consumer, “On a scale of 1 (very unsatisfied) to 5 (very satisfied), how would you rate your overall satisfaction with the support you received?”
• Include open-ended feedback: Ask an open-ended question like, “Did the agent exceed your expectations? Why or why not?” Use this feedback to spot lapses in customer centricity.
• Calculate your CSAT score:Once you have your survey responses, calculate CSAT by dividing the total number of customers who are “very satisfied” (5) or “satisfied” (4) by the total number of responses. Then, multiply that result by 100.

This type of feedback provides valuable intel that you wouldn’t have otherwise known. Say customers reply with low scores and complain they were transferred multiple times before speaking to the right agent. There might be an issue with your interactive voice response (IVR) software—you can take the steps necessary to resolve the problem.

Ideally, you want your CSAT score to increase over time. If CSAT declines, determine the root cause and remedy it.

Monitor churn rate to spot experience gaps

Customer churn rate is the percentage of consumers who stop doing business with you over a specified time frame. If your efforts aren’t paying off, your churn rate will either hold steady or increase.

This metric is the easiest to measure if you have a subscription-based business model because you can see how many subscribers cancel each month, quarter, or year. When evaluated alongside other metrics, it’s a great way to assess what you’re doing well and where you need to improve.

To calculate churn rate, use the following formula:

If your customer service reps receive strong CSAT scores but your churn rate remains high, then your product probably isn’t meeting customer expectations.

Measure customer lifetime value (CLV)

Customer lifetime value (CLV) tracks the amount of money a consumer spends throughout their relationship with a brand. If your company is customer-centric, your buyers will stick with you longer, which means your CLV will be higher.

Here’s how to calculate CLV:

If your CLV consistently decreases month over month and you’ve ruled out product issues, you should check for a decline in CSAT scores. According to Zendesk benchmark data, 61 percent of consumers would switch to a company’s competitor after just one bad customer service experience.

7 steps to improve customer-centricity

Customer centricity doesn’t happen overnight. It may require a complete cultural shift in the organization and training staff on how to be customer-centric. Start with the following tactics, and you’ll be on your way to strengthening customer relationships and growing your business.

1. Deliver customer service that goes above and beyond

Delivering customer-oriented support means giving your agents the tools and flexibility to focus on what the customer needs, not just on closing tickets.

According to Zendesk benchmark data:

• 54% of buyers believe customer service isn’t a priority for most businesses they interact with.

• 81% of shoppers say a positive customer service experience increases the likelihood they’ll make another purchase.

Make a good impression by enabling your support agents to go the extra mile. Chewy offers one of the most endearing customer-centricity examples. When the company heard that a customer’s two dogs had passed away, the customer service team sent the customer a sympathy gift to show their support: a portrait of their pets.

Chewy went above and beyond to deliver a customer-centric experience, offering its customers some emotional nourishment that they’ll never forget.

2. Use a customer journey map to anticipate customer needs

A customer journey map visualizes all your touchpoints so you can better understand your buyers and deliver positive experiences each time they interact with your business.

Consider a competitive industry like hospitality. Hotel brands are always seeking fresh ways to retain their most loyal customers. Before Hilton released a contactless arrival app for its Honors members, the company likely mapped out all possible member pain points and ways the app could remedy them.

Customer support agents are often the first to hear if an experience failed to meet expectations. Their empathetic response can maintain the customer relationship, and they can relay common issues to the marketing or operations team.

For example, hungry Honors members who traveled a long distance might complain that they can’t order room service from the app and have it waiting for them upon arrival.

3. Collect customer feedback across channels

Customer feedback provides your company with valuable insight into how the buyer feels about certain facets of your business. You can use that information to make better customer-centric decisions and improve products, services, and internal processes. Best of all, it can help you build stronger relationships with your audience.

Starbucks took collecting customer feedback to another level with its My Starbucks Idea platform. The concept was simple: customers created a profile and submitted ideas on how to improve the company. What set this apart from being a glorified “suggestion box” was how additional features allowed other users to vote and comment on ideas, creating a community.

You don’t need to have a unique system to capture feedback like Starbucks, though. You can collect customer feedback through various channels, including:

• Customer surveys

• Customer reviews

• Social media posts

• Voice of the Customer (VoC) programs

• Support tickets 

Agents are on the front lines and can tell you what customers are saying and how they’re feeling about your company, products, and services.

Not all feedback is positive, but negative feedback can be the best kind of feedback, as it enables you to implement changes that’ll make your business better.

4. Centralize customer data

Say a jet-lagged Hilton Honors member DMs a room-related question to Hilton’s Facebook account. They don’t get a response, so they call Hilton’s support team. The agent is unaware of the DM, so the now-irritated customer has to rehash the message. Had the agent known about the Facebook DM, they could have provided a more customer-centric experience.

Brian Durney, CTO for online jeweler Chupi, wanted to avoid such situations. He said, “We needed a way to pull all of our customer data into one place. We needed all of our calls, tickets, and DMs from social media going into one platform.”

Durney suspected what our benchmark data reveals: 92 percent of customers will spend more with companies that ensure they won’t need to repeat information.

Durney turned to Zendesk to track these various customer interactions. Agents were able to view them in a single, easy-to-navigate interface. The result? “In 2020, we had a 300-percent increase in care-based sales, resulting in 1 million euros in sales directly from the customer care team,” Durney reported.

5. Use AI to support human connection

AI improves CX by helping companies deliver the speedy, personalized support that today’s customers expect.

AI tools that support customer centricity include:

• Chatbots: Handle common questions and route customers to the right place.
• AI agents: Resolve more complex issues independently with smart automation.
• Voice AI: Deliver faster, natural-sounding support over the phone
• AI-powered insights: Surface customer trends and agent recommendations in real time.

Our CX Trends Report found that consumer favorability of AI in CX has increased to 67 percent, up 10 percentage points year over year. And 81 percent of consumers believe AI has become part of modern customer service, showing how essential AI-driven personalization and responsiveness are to customer satisfaction.

For example, Australian retailer Universal Store used Zendesk AI to automate routine tasks and unify support across channels. This helped reduce response times and allowed agents to focus on complex issues. As a result, they achieved a 92 percent CSAT score and faster issue resolution, demonstrating how AI can drive better customer centricity.

6. Embody your values and company culture

A customer-centric company doesn’t just create products and experiences its audience loves. It develops a strong company culture and lives by its values. It also understands its customers’ values and puts them into practice.

Brands that adopt a culture that prioritizes supporting issues they—and their buyers—care about stand to make a positive difference and grow their customer base. Customer-centric companies should take a page from Patagonia’s playbook.

• Patagonia has pledged 1 percent of sales to the preservation and restoration of the natural environment since 1985.
• The brand refuses to attend a popular trade show in Utah because of the state’s public land-use policies.
• Patagonia founded a nonprofit, 1% for the Planet, that brings other environmentally conscious businesses together to collaborate on projects.

Of course, you don’t need to start a nonprofit to have a social impact. Advocacy can start small. You might donate a portion of each sale to a single charity your customers support and promote that charity on your website’s checkout page.

Authentically embody social responsibility to spread positivity, humanize your brand, and give your customers a sense of pride.

7. Prioritize customer retention

Keeping an existing customer happy is more cost-effective than attracting first-time customers, so it makes sense to prioritize customer retention. Repeat customers are more likely to buy from you again, spend more at the checkout line, and tell friends and family about your company.

To increase customer retention, you have to consider the entire customer experience.

This includes:

• Fast support

• Personalization

• Meeting customers where they are

• Incentivizing loyalty

• Gathering and using customer feedback

Frequently asked questions

Customer story

Catapult Sports

Catapult offers elite CX performance with Zendesk AI

“Zendesk AI Copilot has provided us with tools that save agents time, make their job easier, and empower them to make really good decisions day to day. Because of that, I have a team that really enjoys coming to work.”

Thomas Powers

Vice President of Product Support

Read customer story

Put customer centricity into practice

Building a customer-centric culture in your organization can take a lot of work, but it’s worth the time and expense. Focusing on your customers helps your company create better products and services to meet their expectations. When your buyers are happy, that means a better bottom line.