How to Prioritize Human-Centered Service in Operations

Friday honesty: Customer-centricity is a lot harder to maintain than it seems. Even for those of us in Customer Success. The tendency is always to drift toward making our processes and focus company-centric rather than customer-centric. Don't believe me? Just look at one example of this: Customer Journeys. Many teams say that they have a defined Customer Journey. But rather than actually being oriented around the customer, for many the journey map is a list of activities from the company's perspective that are built around milestones the company cares about (contract signature, go-live, renewal, etc). I know about this, because I've been guilty of it in the past myself. I confuse my activity list with a customer journey and wonder why customers aren't as successful as they'd like. While important, that isn't a customer journey. It's an activity list. It's a rut none of us mean to fall into, but it's the natural drift because we live and breathe our own organization. So what do you do about it? How can you adopt a more customer-centric mindset in this area? TRY THIS APPROACH INSTEAD: 1. List out the stages your customers' business goes through at each phase of their experience with your product. Use these to categorize journey stage, rather than your contract lifecycle. 2. For each stage, list out what their experiences, expectations, and activities should be to get the results they want. Don't focus on listing what YOU do, but rather focus on listing what a customer does at each phase of their business with your product. List out the challenges they'd face, the business benefits they'd experience, the change management they'd have to go through, the usage they'd expect. Think bigger than your product here. 3. Then map what support a customer would need to actually accomplish these desired outcomes at each stage of the journey. Think education, change management enablement, training, etc. 4. Based on all of the above, you're finally ready to start identifying what your teams do to support the customer. ____________________________________________ Following a process like this helps build customer-centricity in 3 ways: 1. It causes customers to be the center of how you decide which activities are most important to focus on. 2. It empowers your team to become prescriptive about what customers should be doing for THEIR success. 3. It exposes what you don't know about your customers' business. And if you don't know something, just ask them. Don't make assumptions when you can instead talk to your customers directly. Avoid the company-centric drift, fight to maintain true customer-centricity however you can. This isn't just a nice to have in 2024. It's a business imperative that's important for any business to survive in this climate. But I want to hear from you! How do you guard your org from drifting to company-centricity? #SaaS #CustomerSuccess #Leadership #CustomerCentric

Being more user-centric doesn’t mean you say “we care about our customers”. Being user-centric means you have systems in place to make sure nobody ever neglects their customers. If I'm trying to help a team become more user-centric, I invest in: * Make it easy to schedule weekly user interviews * A feed integrated directly with customer feedback channels. * A place to categorize, search, and store user interviews and user insight reports * A way to track and follow-up with customers who asked for certain features to both conduct further research with them and tell them if it was built These systems make it easy to talk to customers and incorporate their voices in everything we build. That helps us build the right thing the first time around. I’ll toss some other articles and resources into the comments if you want to dive in more. What are some of your favorite methods to bring you closer to your customers? 

There is a distinction that I have found both in my private sector time as well as in the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), that separates exceptional performers and great teams from mediocre ones. The most critical—yet often overlooked—element isn't process or technology, but mindset. Every interaction and decision is governed by a fundamental question: Where is your focus? On the customer, or on yourself? When self-focus dominates, decisions inevitably trend toward minimizing personal effort, complexity, or discomfort. In essence, you are seeking the most convenient way to get things done for yourself. This seemingly rational approach creates a dangerous trajectory. It shifts the burden towards your customer or end user. It may be something as simple as, “you have to fill out a ticket before I can help you”. However small it may seem, these minor inconviences often accumulate through the entire customer experience to become a demoralizing journey. In contrast, a customer-focused mindset asks different questions: "How can my efforts simplify their experience?" or "What small additional step would make this interaction memorable?" This perspective transforms routine transactions into relationship-building opportunities. The result isn't just satisfied customers, but enthusiastic advocates. The challenge for leaders isn't just practicing this mindset themselves, but cultivating it throughout their teams and organization. This requires deliberate selection, training that emphasizes empathy alongside technical skills, recognition systems that celebrate customer-focused decisions, and leaders who consistently model this priority in their own actions. In today's experience economy, be it in the public or private sectors, this mindset differentiation isn't just nice-to-have—it's the foundation of sustainable competitive advantages. For business that translates into more profits, for the FBI it keeps us ahead of the threats!