How to Make a Product Company More Customer-Centric

Kseniia Aksenova looks at the steps you can take to make your contact centre more customer-centric.

If you work for a product-centric company, your product is your Rosetta Stone, and your Grail. It’s the product that dictates, shapes and enforces everything customer-related.

But if you haven’t created your product or service based on the support you want to provide to your customers, it might be time for a rethink.

How should you perceive customer-centricity, then? As an upgrade.

Customer focus is not instead of product focus, it’s over and above. It’s a duplication of the company’s purpose, but at the higher level, it’s seeing it as being equal to any feature inside its product.

Switching from product to customer and fully substituting one strategy for another is not only deficient but destructive for a company’s culture and spirit. It might be easy to provide software as a service, but design or even art as a service can take much longer to evolve – with less revenue.

There are organisations who think they are focused on both product and customers, where the product department still presumes their superiority and customer service hysterically claims their importance. They don’t work together.

Ideally, they need to be united in a platform to influence each other and grow together.

It’s generally considered that product focus is more energetic and proactive, whereas customer service is reactive by nature. You don’t want to switch energy streams here, but you can manage them to favour both areas.

Just lead your customers. Lead and care. Don’t just serve.

Why?

Because people like to be led and cared for. Especially if they are being led by something or someone better than they are.

You shape your product according to your mission and beliefs. Educating customers and including them in your value system forms a fan base which can’t be disturbed. This fan base will praise you, your product, and your service.

This need for leading with powerful messages behind strong products is highly attractive, so living up to this message and the quality of the product you have will naturally bring you to the customer-centricity.

An organisational upgrade is a leap of faith each company should make: you may get a great product, but if you’re not socially responsible for it, you can’t fill that gap.

Putting something out in the world is already a step to leading: the market, the area, the product niche. But taking responsibility for each and every product/customer relation is what makes companies great.

This platform of product–service leadership is focused on the greater good and you as a producer, but it comes with a stage of social maturity and responsibility which is widely counted as customer focus.

Returning to the specifics of your customer experience, it’s up to you to decide on that. But matching service functions with product values is vital for a smooth and positive brand experience.

This product and customer maturity should be kept in mind when building your strategy. By developing both your products and your customers, you solidify your presence as a customer experience leader.

This product–customer leadership and proactive care comes with dividends of focus, clarity and pride – and it starts with a better you!

With thanks to Kseniia Aksenova, a new writer for Call Centre Helper