What about Customer Centricity?

'Customer Centricity'-Well we have heard this term on and off, perhaps all our professional lives. We've had brown bag sessions, sprint meetings, code reviews, all hands , where we'e heard our managers and senior leaders talking about how customers could be delighted. Every marketing collateral these days speaks about how customers are always right and its imperative for companies to ensure customers are happy with their service. We have also seen companies desperately asking their customers to rate their apps on Android Play or on the iOS store , right after they are done showing an ad. We have also seen companies trying to reach out to customers every now and then to understand more about what they want and how they can help them. As much as consumer psychology is pertinent to business, what's even more important is how a business treats its customers. Let's talk about customer centricity in detail.

Judging from my personal experience in the Indian business stratosphere, I can confidently say we have never been about customer centricity. Although some businessman have built real successful empires and amassed wealth with their products and services, it was essentially because they were fulfilling an important human need better than the competitors or there were no competitors and they were in a monopolistic market. As much as it is important to solve a human need as specified by Abraham Maslow, customer centricity is what takes the business to an altogether different level. In the last 5 years I have read almost all major biographies of some of the most successful entrepreneurs on the planet ,and what I gathered from each of these biographies was a bunch of traits that were common with each of these gentlemen. I am not going to discuss about all of them but one of the most important one that almost everyone from Steve Jobs to Sam Walton to Jeff Bezos to Tony Hsieh believed in was customer centricity. I decided to dig further to understand the reason behind this blind obsession with customer centricity and came across a bunch of revelations.

Sam Walton in his biography 'Made in America' talks about how in the early days of Walmart , he had decided he would create a retail chain that would provide the best products to customers at a shoestring price and the experience of walking inside a Walmart store would be so awesome that the customer would keep on coming. He faced a lot of issues but eventually had it his way. In the process he created one of the largest retail chains on the planet. Walmart customers have always been loyal to Walmart not because of the products but because of the way they are treated inside a Walmart store. When Steve Jobs was creating the Apple Stores , he drew inspiration from the Ritz Carlton experience and instructed his staff to be extra nice to customers even if customers don't wish to buy, they still need to walk out happy. Keeping the same in mind every Apple Store around the world ensures everybody who walks in can take a tour and use the new apple products on display. Most customers which includes me as well , are sold out on the experience inside an Apple store. In fact Steve Jobs from quite early on was sold out on the Customer Experience part. He wanted to create devices that were so beautiful, so powerful and so easy to use that any customer that used it will never buy any other device. In fact he and Jonathan Ivey were such design fanatics that they knew stuff at a consumer level more than the consumer did. Today as an apple user myself for close to a decade its quite hard to envision my life with any other device other than apple. The customer experience part is fabulous. Apple is a great example of customer centricity through design and service. Have you ever called an apple customer care? Well if you haven't you'd want to call one and listen to the way the guys are so eager and ready to help you with your issue. I have had such fab experience with Apple customer care that anytime anything happens to my devices, I am never second thoughts about calling customer care.

Talking about Customer Experience and not mentioning Zappos, would be a cardinal sin. In fact I just wrapped up 'Delivering Happiness' by Tony Hsieh. Its a fascinating book that shows the importance of Customer Centricity and how it helped Zappos become a billion dollar behemoth that was finally acquired by Amazon, another formidable player in the customer centricity process. Zappos understood one fact clearly that they will only grow if they can have their existing customers come to them again and again. They decided that the only way a customer will transition from a buyer to a loyalist to a brand ambassador is if they could provide Wowlicious service. In fact that is part of their culture code as created by Tony and his entire team. It paid up for them as they started observing customers coming back again and again and bringing 10 more new customers. Word of mouth marketing, one of the most powerful forms of marketing worked for them and helped them get viral.

Let's talk about Amazon now, one of my hot favourites. No one does customer service as well as Amazon. I have been a regular customer for close to a decade and I see no reason I would migrate to another eCommerce vendor. Every time I order something on Amazon , its an extremely pleasant experience. Anytime I have initiated a return process they have sent someone to fetch the stuff without any questions. Their refunds are fast. If I am away from home and there is a POD(Pay On Delivery) , the delivery person would send me a link and wait till I can make the payment remotely and then deliver the package. They have paid me generously for using their payment interface. Its like Amazon knows me better than I know myself. The bond with Amazon is extremely emotional as much as it might appear commercial. That could only happen if a company operates with the tenets of customer centricity at its core.

What is Customer centricity? How is it different from Customer Service or Customer Experience? Well I wouldn't go too deep into it but this blog by Matt Lemay explains it beautifully. Let''s look at the following diagram to see the difference

From the above diagram its quite clear what customer centricity means and how its quite different from Customer Service and Customer Experience. Problem is most organisations do not really understand what customer centricity means. They feel if they are good at serving customers momentarily then they are customer centric or if the customer experience they provide is state of the art then they are customer centric. What they and most people suffer from is a type of cognitive bias called 'empathy gap'. It clearly translates to how a person with a certain state of mind cannot understand another with a different state of mind. Let me cut an example to explain that. Just a year back I ordered food from an online food ordering app. It was a bit late and I had just returned home from a rigorous 6 hour travel. I was completely worn out. I just wanted to eat something good and crash. So I ordered a biryani. Usually the delivery time is close to 30 mins or less. On that specific day even after 40 minutes there was absolutely no sign of my order. I did what anyone else would naturally do in such a scenario. I called up the customer care who asked me how did I like my biryani? When I told her the biryani wasn't delivered she apologised and after speaking with the delivery guy, informed me that it had been wrongly delivered to a different address(how that happened is beyond my comprehension). Anyway she said she will ensure I get the same biryani I ordered in the next 30 minutes. I waited with a hungry stomach for close to 40 more minutes only to realise that the biryani finally delivered to me was a paneer biryani as opposed to the chicken biryani I had ordered and it was almost 12:45 in the night and I was famished. I accepted the biryani and ate it to satiate my pangs of hunger. Now one might say that the app the company designed has amazing user experience or the service provided by the customer service person was next to fabulous, but the fact is it left a bitter taste in my mouth. I was really pissed at the company. I didn't order for close to a year from them. If the company were customer centric they would have designed every part of their business around delighting the customer. So in a nutshell customer centricity is when the customer leaves delighted or happy. Happiness happens at two different levels-psychological and biological. A happy customer has to experience both these types of happinesses in order to be happy. A psychological type of happiness is when expectations are met wrt a product or a service and biological happiness is when happiness is served to the sentient self and is perceived as a pleasure by the mind. The melancholy is that not many products or services have had the capability to touchbase both these types of happinesses save a few on the planet that are extremely customer centric.

Now lets look at another example where I faced an issue with a vegetable delivery app. I had ordered some pomegranates and one of them turned out to be bad. I called up the customer service guy and told him about the bad fruit. He put me on hold and told me that when they had delivered all the fruits were fine. When I asked him if he is rubbishing my point, he said he isn't. Then when I asked him what can he do and how can he ensure I get value for the money I spent. He put me on hold again as he wanted to consult with his superiors. After a while with a little bit of reluctance in his voice he remarked that he will happily put the cost of one pomegranate back in my account. You know I really don't hold grudges with the customer service guy. He is part of the system which does not have solution for an insurgency like that. Again if this were a customer centric company it would ensure I get the best fruit available in the market and if per chance the fruit went bad they would have gladly refunded my money without any discussions and doubts. That sets out to prove that customer centricity is deeply embedded somewhere in the culture code of the company. If the culture of the company does not allow customer to be placed at the core of every activity then employees would not be doing it as passionately as one would imagine.

Take a look at the following picture(ignore the improper geometric alignment).

Those are the Zappos core value. If you see the first one 'Deliver WOW through service' , its something that is in the DNA of the company. Everything they do is to ensure they take an extra mile to help the customer and ensure the customer has a WOW experience. Every employee of Zappos receives a core value document that keeps changing from time to time but the very ethos of the document is to do whatever it takes to ensure customers get a WOW experience. It clearly shows how the culture code of a company plays an important role in shaping the customer experience towards delight. The Henry Ford kinda monopolistic ideology devoid of customer centricity does not really work in today's world. In a world subject to dynamism and red oceans , without putting the customer at the core of every single activity of the company might not bear results. How a company does it could be invariably different. For Nike one of the most innovative companies in the world, its always about how a pair of running shoes or sports shoes could be made far more useful to its customers most of whom are athletes, runners, gymnasts or any sportsman. For apple customer centricity has been through design. How they could WOW their customers with such amazingly designed gadgets and mindblowing service(at their customer care centers or at their stores)? For Amazon and Zappos it has been doing everything it takes to ensure the customer is delighted. If you take a look at the Amazon ads itself, you'd fidn the emotional connect they try to establish through their ads

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g6A64L72F-o

Funny thing is India is one of those places where not many companies pay a lot of attention to customer centricity. I have in my 17 years of experience heard discussions around design, product, technology, strategy or most recently data but I barely see discussions around customer centricity. No one takes it seriously. The customer is perhaps at the bottom of the value chain. Add lackadaisical attitude to it along with an abysmal absence of a customer centric culture and we have ourselves-a recipe for disaster. Does that explain why the startup ecosystem has not been able to produce a 100B+ company from India? There could be business model issues, there could be hiring problems, cash flow issues or founder disagreements but what neither the venture capital industry nor the founders ever focused on was to make a customer centric organisation. When was the last time I heard a taxi hailing service apologising to me since their drivers cancelled on me and wasted my time? I guess never. When was the last time an airline apologised to me for a delay in their flight? Never. When was the last time a food ordering app went an extra mile to make me happy as one of their orders went bad? Never. When was the last time an eCommerce vendor that sent a rowdy guy to my place without any card machine or UPI code , who wouldn't accept anything other than cash and was outright rude, apologise for this mishap? Never. We have taken the customers for granted. Although we talk about it at various discussion forums but we really miss out on feeling the entire ethos of customer centricity since we lack the empathy required to understand a customer's state of mind. When a food delivery app does not deliver food in time and then tends to refund the money by saying 'sorry', what it doesn't realise is that the refunded money is not good enough compensation for the damage it has caused by destroying every part of what could have been a wonderful dining experience. That is exactly where Behavioural Productisation comes up. Data being one lens to figure out customer satisfaction along with qualitative frameworks like NPS(Net Promoter Score) subject to a lot of cognitive bias, aren't sufficient tools to understand deep down about-what makes a customer happy? Unless that enigma is unraveled and customer centricity is enforced as a mission statement of the company, thereby reflecting in the culture code , we might never be able to create an Amazon or a Zappos in India.