Building a Customer-Centric Culture Through Experience Strategies

#CustomerExperience leaders need to split their strategies into deliberate bottom-up and top-down approaches. Many get the bottom-up right, but they struggle with the top-down. Bottom-up strategies focus on improving customer-centric employee behaviors at scale. These approaches include #CX or empathy training for front-line workers, using Voice of Customer feedback to set touchpoint expectations based on customer feedback, and building customer-centric KPIs into individual performance appraisals. But where many CX leaders struggle is often with engaging senior leaders to influence their customer-centric behaviors. It's difficult to influence C-suite behavior, but if you're expected to improve customer-centric culture in the organization, then you cannot avoid this. Top-down strategies start with showing senior leaders how customer satisfaction impacts growth, retention, margin, and lifetime value. It also includes improving CX and VoC reporting to provide more recommendations and actions, not just findings and data. Having discussions with leaders about the importance of financial and non-financial rewards for customer-centric behaviors is another tool in the top-down toolkit. And using personas and journey maps is a vital way to convert customer and touchpoint data into a compelling story of necessary change. Don't rely on dashboards and reports to do the job of top-down CX engagement. Don't count on a couple of positive customer-centric comments from leaders as a sign of meaningful, irreversible support. And do not assume that the fact your CX job exists is evidence of senior leaders' commitment to customer experience. Part of the job for a successful CX leader is to constantly prove the value of customer-centric strategies, influence senior leader priorities, and arm decision-makers with the insight they need to make customer-centric decisions. Don't just empower your frontline workers and assume the job is done. If you aren't building a consistent dialog with executives, you're not only missing an opportunity to make the most significant customer impact but also seeding future problems that can lead to declining support, budget, and resources for customer experience initiatives. Take a comment today to identify or define your top-down and bottom-up CX strategies for 2024. If there's an imbalance, solving that now can lead to better outcomes by the end of this year.

Everyone talks about building a customer-centric culture, but how do you actually make it happen? After years of seeing what works (and what doesn’t), I’ve noticed even the best leaders hit the same roadblocks on their way to true customer centricity. The good news? Small shifts make a big difference. Here are three key barriers and ways to overcome them: 1. Being too focused on internal metrics. It’s natural to prioritize business goals, but if the customer isn’t top of mind, your decisions can drift off course. Consider every change from the customer’s perspective to keep your team aligned. 2. Not getting the whole team on board. Customer experience isn’t just a task for your support team—it’s a company-wide commitment. One thing I’ve learned is that when the whole team buys into that mindset, it changes how you operate. It’s up to leaders to make sure everyone understands how their role impacts the customer journey. 3. Collecting feedback but not acting on it. Feedback is a powerful tool, but only if it leads to action. I always encourage my team to see it as an opportunity to grow and improve—after all, it’s coming straight from the people we’re here to serve. Building a customer-centric culture takes focus, but the payoff is real. By keeping your team aligned and tackling these barriers, you’ll foster stronger relationships and lasting loyalty. 💪

At Ema, we believe that customer focus is more important than executive focus. In many larger organizations, junior team members often feel pressured to prioritize “managing up” — spending the bulk of their time keeping senior executives informed and satisfied. But in a startup like ours, we simply can’t afford to direct our energy inward. We need everyone’s attention focused outward, on creating real value for customers. One of the proudest moments for me is when a more junior colleague declines a 1:1 with me because they’ve got an important meeting with a customer. That’s exactly the culture we want — where each person feels empowered to prioritize what moves the needle for the business, rather than what’s conventionally expected in a corporate hierarchy. Here’s how we work to “de-executive” our culture at Ema: * Empower Prioritization - Everyone has the autonomy to choose the most critical tasks or meetings. If a customer call conflicts with a meeting with me, I want them to take that call. * Flatten the Hierarchy - We minimize layers of approval and emphasize that valuable input can come from anyone — no matter their title or tenure. * Reward Customer-Centric Behavior - We celebrate examples where teammates go the extra mile for a customer, and that includes giving them the freedom to reschedule a 1:1 with a so-called 'executive'. We've banned all executives in the company. * Model the Behavior at the Top - Leadership sets the tone by actively encouraging people to “push back” if it serves customers better. We’re here to support the team, not to create more work for them. By keeping our focus on customers rather than internal politics, we’re building a stronger company and delivering better experiences. And the best part? Our team members feel more empowered, recognized, and fulfilled in their roles. I’m proud of our people-first, customer-first culture at Ema — and I hope this inspires other organizations to rethink how they’re spending their time. Would love to hear from fellow leaders and startups: how do you empower your teams to put customer needs front and center? — #startupculture #customerfirst #leadership #innovation #FutureOfWork