Customer culture refers to the relationship between your employees and your customers. It represents the desire, shared by the entire company, to place the customer at the center of its concerns.
After talking to you recently about customer experience in the BtoB sectorand the importance of defining a customer repositorylet's talk today about the key subject of Customer Culture. Let's find out why and how to develop a strong Customer Culture within your company.
Customer culture: a definition
Customer culture is a set of values and behaviors shared by all employees of a given company. The aim of this customer culture is to place the customer and his satisfaction at the heart of the company's strategy.
Why develop your teams' customer culture?
Products/services that meet real customer expectations, personalized customer relations, employees who take initiatives to improve the customer experienceAnd what if it all came down to just one thing: customer culture?
Identify new business opportunities
- Anticipating new customer behaviors
- Improve the match between product/service offering and customer expectations
Improving customer satisfaction and loyalty
- Tailor-made experiences
- Strengthening the emotional bond with customers
Optimizing operational efficiency
- Simplify decision-making processes
- Reduce time-to-market
Enhanced brand image
- Creating brand preference
- Differentiate yourself from the competition
Developing employee commitment
- Use new collaborative work methods
- Giving greater meaning to actions and projects
How do you develop this customer culture?
Many companies are attempting to transform their culture from a "product orientation" to a "customer orientation". However, these transformations are often not carried out in sufficient depth within the company to anchor this new culture.
This is because 4 complementary levers need to be activated to truly develop a customer culture within the company...
Employee behavior
The way we act and interact with others on a daily basis
Organization and work methods
Organizational levers, methodologies, governance
The rituals
of the company
Habits and objects conveying values and beliefs
Employee beliefs and values
What is defined as good or bad within a group
Influencing employee behavior
Develop employees' customer orientation and interpersonal skills
Case studies, Serious Game, MOOC, e-learning, face-to-face training, .... Train employees in the best customer relations practices and set up specific customer experience activities (events, immersions).
- Géodis trains its customer service advisors via a Serious Game dedicated to customer relations.
- Nexity has trained 6,000 employees in customer culture to develop their Soft Skills, with role-playing by actors.
Encourage employees to take customer-oriented initiatives
Inspire employees by disseminating market best practices internally, set up challenges to encourage initiative,...
- BMW introduces awards for dealers with the most innovative customer-focused projects.
- KIABI has set up an internal platform where employees can share their employee-oriented or customer-oriented initiatives (in a spirit of symmetry of attention). These initiatives have, for example, enabled us to review our loyalty program and redefine our relationship promise.
Influence organization and work methods
Implement customer-oriented work methodologies
- Sage trains its technical support teams in Design Thinking methods, so that they can help customers identify problems and work on solutions.
- ING sets up a "Customer Experience" day during which employees, accompanied by Agile coaches, experiment with different methodologies (scrum, kanban, etc.) to develop new, simple and effective actions to improve the customer experience.
Putting the customer at the heart of the company's approaches, methodologies and decisions
Integrate the customer at the heart of the product and service value chain, co-construct tomorrow's offerings with them, share the customer's vision at strategic meetings,...
- Décathlon has set up a co-creation platform to enable all athletes to participate in the design and development of products and services.
- OUI SNCF has created the "Connect & vous" collaborative platform to exchange with member customers and co-construct tomorrow's services.
- AG2R La Mondiale has set up the "Silver Lab", a user club enabling small groups of retired seniors to test innovative solutions, technologies and services proposed by start-ups and partners specializing in the Silver economy.
Implement and monitor customer-focused indicators up to the highest corporate levels
Measuring the main customer satisfaction/experience indicators (NPS, CES, etc.) and distributing them to all levels of the company, integrating customer satisfaction and loyalty into objectives and even into employees' variable pay, taking customer feedback into account (calling back unsatisfied customers, defining corrective action plans, informing customers of the follow-up given to their feedback, etc.).
- Leroy Merlin communicates to all its employees 3 customer indicators linked to their job.
- Décathlon withdraws from sale products with a rating of less than 3 out of 5 and with a minimum of 25 comments.
- Malakoff Humanis displays customer satisfaction KPIs in real time in the offices of head office managers.
Acting on company rituals
Embodying customers within the company through dedicated rituals
- Nexity places a red chair at the CODIR table to reflect the need to consider the impact of projects on the customer experience, both internally and externally.
- FDJ reconstitutes a point-of-sale on its premises to get a feel for the day-to-day life of retailers (in addition to regular field visits).
Develop customer knowledge and disseminate the voice of the customer within the company
Listen to customers to understand their expectations, needs and behaviors, and disseminate this information to all employees, in particular by integrating it into our tools.
- FDJ provides a Customer Experience watch via an intranet and monthly forums: literature, trends, examples of concrete initiatives.
- FDJ provides employees with a customer acculturation tool: the "Players Kit". This kit was built using a quantitative survey supplemented by immersions with players to understand their behaviors and build personae, presenting their moments of truth and main expectations.
- Colissimo uses semantic analysis tools to retrieve and exploit customer feedback.
- Bristol Myers Squibb starts every Comex with 5 minutes dedicated to customer feedback.
Influence employees' beliefs and values
Raising employee awareness of customer experience issues
- SNCF sends out customer-focused newsletters; content is qualified according to the time you have to devote to it ("you have 2 minutes, 10 minutes...").
- Sarenza integrates the customer's vision into the integration process for new employees.
- Picard integrates customer focus into all training programs.
Communicate the customer vision to all levels of the company, especially to senior management
- Malakoff Humanis has dissatisfied customers called back directly by top management as part of a customer satisfaction improvement program.
- MAIF has developed employee autonomy and empowerment through "manager-coaches". It has strengthened employees' ability to make decisions through trust, transparency of information, and the right to make mistakes.
- Free has set up 14 digital communities of "Freenauts", who meet with management every year to share innovations.
How can iQo help you?
iQo is a new player in the consulting whose mission is to "liberate collective genius to co-construct desirable futures". Our firm offers a unique approach to co-construction with our customers ...
- We advocate the hybridization of skills and know-how.
- We offer small, agile teams who are genuinely committed to working alongside you, as an extension of your teams.
- We are "makers" and offer you concrete, results-oriented solutions tailored to your specific needs.
- We're committed: we're an ISO 14001 and B-corp certified company with a mission.
Our Marketing & Customer Experience offer is structured around 5 themes:
- Customer strategy,
- Customer experience innovation,
- Marketing & sales efficiency,
- Customer relationship efficiency
- Customer-focused transformation.
We have developed specific expertise in the development of a customer-centric organization: building a customer experience strategy, setting up a customer listening system, disseminating customer culture, etc.
If you'd like to find out more and discuss any of these topics with us, don't hesitate to contact us at contact@iQo.eu!
Every quarter, you'll receive the iQoScope by email, featuring feedback and best practices from our Marketing & Customer Experience projects.
Further information
How do you define a Customer Experience framework?
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How do you build an effective customer experience strategy?
Asking the question of customer experience strategy means recognizing that taking customer experience into account has gradually spread throughout companies.
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