Why Is Customer-Centricity Important For Achieving Customer Success?

While both customer success and customer centricity aim to prioritize the customer's needs and satisfaction, there are important differences between the two concepts. Customer success focuses on ensuring customers achieve their desired outcomes using a company's products or services. On the other hand, customer centricity involves building a business model around the customer and deeply understanding their needs, preferences, and behaviors.

Our economy is a consumer-led economy where things are happening faster than we think. The increasing competition in SaaS enterprises, technology, and product reviews & listings have changed how businesses conduct themselves in front of their customers.

Product reviews are creating a frenzy of instant customer feedback, making SaaS enterprise companies focus on customer satisfaction to achieve customer success by following a customer-centric approach for their organizations.  

In research done by Salesforce with over 6000 consumers, they found that 66% of consumers expected companies to understand their needs and expectations, and 82% of them expected companies to be able to accommodate their preferences and meet their expectations.

Customer-centricity allows you to define for yourself and outline the experience your consumers and customers will have with your product. It requires organizations to intentionally make an effort to focus on their customer's satisfaction and user experience while making organizational decisions to achieve the ultimate goal, which is customer success.  

Companies that were once following a product-centric approach are moving towards a customer-centric approach by focusing on retaining their customers and providing them with value delivery and satisfaction.  

Let us dive deep and understand how customer success and customer-centricity help organizations grow.

What Is Customer Success?

SaaS companies that aim to achieve higher growth and customer lifetime value (CLV) must focus on building an effective customer success strategy.

Customer success works in understanding how customers engage with your product post-sale and finding ways to optimize their engagement.

Customer success is a method that guides customers throughout their journey, ensuring that they reach their desired outcomes when using an organization's product or service. It helps organizations anticipate customer challenges or questions and proactively provide solutions and answers.

A client relationship-focused customer success strategy helps align customer goals with companies' objectives, including involvement in the purchase decision, implementation, adoption of products or services, and customer support.

Customer success helps boost customer happiness and retention, thus increasing your revenue and customer loyalty.

What Is Customer-Centricity?

Customer centricity is the fuel that ignites the growth of SaaS enterprise companies and helps them to deliver high value to their customers. Companies must show that it follows a "customer first" approach to their prospects. They must listen, understand, and advocate for the customer's needs.

Most organizations today talk about being customer-centric, but in reality, they fail to adopt customer-centricity. If you ask most customers about their experience with those organizations, they are usually unsatisfied.

It is where customer-centricity comes in handy, as it helps organizations to provide a better customer experience and avoid customer churn.

Customer centricity is the ability of people in an organization to understand customers' situations, perceptions, and expectations that help foster a positive customer experience at every stage of the customer journey.

The customer-centric organization makes decisions keeping its customers as the focal point of all decisions related to delivering products, services, and experiences. It builds customer loyalty and satisfaction that leads to referrals for more customers.

Customer Success VS Customer-Centricity

An organization must build a customer-centric culture to achieve customer success and prevent customer churn. It is a win-win strategy for your customers as well as your organization.

Customer satisfaction with your product will encourage them to renew their subscription monthly or yearly. It is also an opportunity for your organization to sell more products to these customers, as happy customers are more likely to buy more products from you and even advocate your product in their network, which is how your company achieves organizational success.

However, It will be helpful to understand the difference between customer-centricity and customer success; when planning overall objectives and SMART goals for your organization.

Customer centricity is an approach to understanding your customer's concerns and pain points that helps to make organizational decisions keeping your customer as the focal point to provide solutions for a better customer experience.

Customer success is the approach that uses customer-centricity to lead them on an effortless customer journey and help them achieve their desired goals.

Why Does A Company Need Customer-Centricity To Achieve Customer Success?

Companies must create a positive experience for the customer throughout their journey to deliver higher value and keep every member of the organization on board. A company's success depends on how much sales revenue they generate and how many customers are retained every year.

An organization must understand what customers value and keep delivering that.

The best way for a company to build this success pathway is by establishing a customer-centric culture for its organization. Every team in the organization must be on board to fulfill their role toward customer-centricity.

Customer-centricity provides a competitive edge to companies, as they tend to outperform other non-customer-centric business organizations.

Research shows that customer-centric companies are 60% more profitable than companies that aren't. It helps them acquire more customers and retain them long-term, building higher customer loyalty and customer satisfaction with your product.

According to this survey, 82% of customer-centric companies have their employees glad to continue working with the company. However, 20% of employees in other non-customer-centric companies are not.

Conclusion

Customer-centricity puts the customer at the center of all you do and fosters a corporate culture that encourages your employees to make the best decisions for your organization and customers.

The reward of customer-centricity is greater loyalty and retention, which is the ultimate goal of every organization to achieve customer success.

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)

How do you build an effective customer success strategy?

Building an effective customer success strategy involves:

1. Identifying clear customer goals and success metrics
2. Creating detailed customer journey maps
3. Developing standardized onboarding processes
4. Implementing regular check-ins and success reviews
5. Establishing clear communication channels
6. Setting up automated monitoring and alert systems
7. Creating scalable processes for growth

What tools are essential for customer success?

Essential customer success tools include:

1. Customer Success Platform (e.g., Gainsight, ChurnZero)
2. CRM System (e.g., Salesforce, HubSpot)
3. Communication Tools (e.g., Slack, Zoom)
4. Analytics Platform (e.g., Mixpanel, Amplitude)
5. Project Management Software (e.g., Asana, JIRA)

If you are looking for a single tool which helps with customer-centric onboarding and implementation then CogniSaaS must be your first choice. 

What is customer success operations?

Customer success operations (CS Ops) is the department responsible for:

• Implementing and managing customer success strategies
• Optimizing processes and workflows
• Managing customer success technology stack
• Analyzing data and creating reports
• Supporting the customer success team with resources and tools

How do you scale customer success operations?

Scaling customer success operations requires:

1. Implementing automated processes
2. Creating standardized playbooks
3. Investing in the right technology stack
4. Building a data-driven approach
5. Developing clear metrics and KPIs
6. Training and enabling team members