The Most Sustainable Growth Enabler

Did you know that “The customer is always right” is one of the most-misquoted expressions? The full quote, often attributed to Harry Gordon Selfridge, founder of an early-1900s department store, is as follows: “The customer is always right in matters of taste.”

Quite a different sentiment. That said, I think there’s an adjustment to the truncated quotation that bears consideration: focusing on the customer is always right.

Focusing on the customer is the means to most organizations’ primary aim: sustained success. And throughout my career, I’ve witnessed the positive repercussions of this play out over and over again.

I’ve seen a sales representative drive to our distribution center to pick up and hand-deliver a part to a customer so they could get equipment up and running. I’ve seen our global engineering and technical teams work around the clock to find a solution to customer downtime caused by poor fuel quality. And I’ve seen our sales team bring insights and analytics to our customers to help them identify new growth opportunities.

In each case, these actions helped reinforce mutual success and enable strong partnerships for both parties to succeed. If you see a customer-centric culture as inextricably linked to thriving success, there are a myriad of benefits and interrelated, positive effects that enable company growth.

This focus naturally leads to doing these five things (at a minimum):

1. Continuous conversation and feedback loops. Regular communication and ongoing customer feedback will give you a better understanding of their needs across audience segments, customer journeys, product applications, etc. Deep, relevant and timely insights into your customers’ minds will also keep you ahead of your competitors.
2. Hiring (and retaining) competent, enthusiastic people for right-fit roles. In the end, every role is a customer service role. Just because HR, for example, isn’t customer-facing doesn’t mean they don’t have a strong impact on customer satisfaction. Hiring exceptional candidates, onboarding thoroughly, and allowing employees’ strengths, weaknesses and personalities (not just work experience) to inform the best roles for them will serve the customer, and your business well. Additionally, recruiting and retention are easier because real, sustained customer focus demands an internal culture of respect, excellence and teamwork. When employees know they’re making a difference for customers, it builds morale, engagement and loyalty.
3. Increasing efficiency across the board. Customer focus gives employees a fixed point of reference, a common aim to rally around. It creates a link between their daily responsibilities to the impact they have on customers. With a laser-focused team engaged in intentional, strategic action, efficiency is a given.
4. Promoting empowerment vs. consensus. No micro-managing. No 1,000 people to get a “Yes” and one ”No” to shoot a great solution down. Moving fast serves the customer well, so you’ll empower your team members to act on their expertise and take decisive action. This will also influence the sense of safety people need in order to think of and suggest new ideas, processes and creative innovations.
5. Making decisions with net-positive implications. Customer focus demands that everyone, from leadership down, is well-versed in the key drivers of your business. Not the minutiae, but information such as how your product creates value, how you go to market, your supply chain, and what other teams do, along with the internal and external assets and resources available, should be widely known. That way, decisions are made with full context instead of in siloes. Changes will be beneficial to the business as a whole vs. narrowly focused on a specific function or region.

The ultimate takeaway: Focusing on whatever helps your customers also helps impact every aspect of your business. When you filter your actions through a customer focus, the result is a sustainable growth enabler full of exponential possibilities.