Defining client centricity and unpacking its power
A seven-step framework to build a client-centric strategy at your organization
Building team centricity for client success
Client centricity is more than a strategy, it is a culture and a way of doing business that prioritizes client interests in core decision making and processes. Client-centric organizations are centered around a clear understanding of the role that clients play in keeping them in business. Hence, all decisions impacting them are focused on delivering a positive client experience across the entirety of the buyer’s journey, including the post-sales stage.
One of the goals of client-centric businesses is to build loyalty and advocacy. This not only prevents client churn but also facilitates acquisition based on factors such as brand reputation and word-of-mouth marketing. Business decisions at client-centric companies keep the client's interests front and center.
Here are four measurable benefits of client centricity:
Client acquisition costs 5-7x more than retention (Forbes, 2022). In addition, any marketing spend on acquisition at the top of your funnel is unlikely to boost your growth and ROI if clients are churning at the bottom of the funnel. A client-centric approach focused on identifying and meeting client needs not only reduces churn, but also has the capability to encourage brand evangelism. This advocacy, if nurtured, has the potential to snowball to bring in new clients, growth, and a higher ROI on your marketing spend.
Better retention rates as a result of client centricity directly relate to higher CLTV as clients renew partnerships. This, in turn, ensures a steady and potentially scalable revenue stream for the company as these clients are more likely to upsell and cross-sell.
Organizations that adopt client centricity are more likely to accurately track the evolving needs of their clients. This enables teams to identify pain points as they arise and tailor product development accordingly. Informing this process with data insights improves efficiency and cuts down on go-to-market lead times. For instance, a SaaS demand generation company can update its service to include lead qualification and analytics tools to accelerate client sales cycles—a common pain point for many.
The B2B marketplace is crowded and incredibly competitive.
This, combined with the challenging economic headwinds and volatile business environment, makes client centricity essential as a key differentiator. Indeed, according to a 2022 Forrester Report, nearly 20% of brands are witnessing a drop in the quality of client experience in 2022. Investing in client-centric strategies is therefore central to future-proofing growth and securing a competitive edge.
Today’s buyer has come to expect higher standards of service, attention, and personalization. However, creating a client-centric organization in the digital world is a complex task that requires substantial resources. Indeed, making the shift to a client focus requires restructuring your organizational culture and the adoption of tech stacks that allow for automation. Achieving client centricity necessitates a business-wide commitment to the success of clients and, subsequently, the right culture, processes, and goals, as illustrated below:
The journey towards client centricity begins with redefining the core values of your organization and then sharing them at every internal and external touchpoint. Workflow processes need to remain agile to evolve in line with changing client needs, and business decisions must be realigned to client interests.
The journey to a client-centric culture can be broken down into the following seven steps:
1. Understanding your clients
2. Defining and sharing your client-centric vision
3. Aligning internal teams to the new vision
4. Empowering employees
5. Developing client-centric processes
6. Adopting client-centric KPIs
7. Implementing best practices
Building a client-centric culture is a transformational shift from a revenue and profit lens to one of client experience and satisfaction to deliver a positive brand experience.
Client centricity is built on a foundation of knowledge on your prospective buyers. Understanding your client’s needs, pain points, and behavior patterns will enable you to anticipate and resolve issues proactively while giving you deep insights into their expectations and behavior. With the right processes, each client engagement and touchpoint is an opportunity to collect valuable client information.
After all, the more you know about your clients, the better you can serve them.
Below are two core strategies for developing this understanding:
Client-centric companies are celebrated beyond their products for understanding the client's business, the challenges they face, their industry trends, and their competition.
Research your client's business and industry
Start by researching your client’s business, their industry, and their position within it. Identify industry-specific trends relevant to their niche through content from reputable sources on platforms such as online communities and social media. This can help you acquire an understanding of overall brand sentiment from both industry experts and everyday clients.
Next, bolster your findings with further research into the specifics of your client’s products/services and the pain points they solve (or are trying to solve). Gaining an understanding of how the client’s products help the needs of their clients will help you provide the best support.
Finally, combining your research with in-depth conversations with the prospective client can provide you with a holistic view of how your product or service can provide the best outcomes.
Accurate strategies and services require insight. Creating a continuous feedback loop with your clients is the best way to get valuable insights, while also building empathy.
The feedback loop has four stages:
Ask: Source feedback from your clients using strategies like surveys, focus groups, and direct client interaction. The goal of this stage is to uncover client needs and their pain areas.
Categorize: The feedback you receive needs to be prioritized based on urgency and allocated for action to the relevant teams. For instance, feedback on a website error needs to be actioned by the engineering team.
Act: This stage is where you take action to address the client's feedback.
Follow-up: Reconnect with clients who provide feedback via the sales representatives that they normally interact with and convey the action taken by the company to address the issues they flagged. Showing that feedback resulted in change helps to build trust and a client-centric image of your brand.
Share these impactful insights from client feedback across your teams to support a client-centric culture and optimize strategies with findings.
Start by defining a clear set of client-centric values across your company, with empathy at the center.
A critical step in prioritizing clients is to reinforce the values you define across your organization. Some common strategies include:
Implementing training sessions for new and existing employees as necessary;
Leveraging company communication channels to share updates pertaining to values;
Creating a strong feedback loop that shares insights across departments to ensure a clear focus on client experience.
Brand perception can often be fragile. Based on the quality of your product/service and the quality of their interactions with your team, brand perception requires excellence. Hence, it is critical for your client-facing employees, like marketing, sales, and client service, to live the client-centric values on a day-to-day basis.
Take client centricity a step further by including it in your recruitment process. When hiring, evaluate candidates for both their job skills and how well they will fit into your culture based on attitude and personality.
Effective client centricity is built on robust organization-wide alignment and interdepartmental processes. Below are some key strategies for supporting alignment.
Before adopting or optimizing client centricity across your teams, you need to first assess the current level of client centricity. Survey internal teams as well as a selected cross-section of your clients to get an accurate picture of the gaps and the strengths in your client service, communication, and feedback processes. This will allow you to identify the next steps set with time-bound and incremental targets.
Once you have set targets for client centricity, be sure to provide your teams with the training they need to action strategies and subsequent optimizations. This should be ongoing and informed by client feedback and insights collected, as well as the latest developments and trends that are likely to impact your clients and their experience. Create a support network within your organization so that team members can receive mentoring and share their own feedback as needed.
Client centricity, while often seen as the priority of client-facing teams only, should be viewed and upheld as a shared responsibility for all teams. For example, product and engineering teams need to be aware of client needs in order to update and customize products to meet the client's needs. Ensure that leaders from these teams sit in on relevant client meetings to get real-time feedback.
Consider incentivizing client centricity efforts by celebrating success with recognition and performance-based rewards. This can be a powerful motivator and tool, particularly for teams that are new to maintaining a client-centric approach, as this will likely involve increased or new workloads.
Finally, be sure to empower team leaders to closely monitor the quality of the client experience being provided. As internal champions, these team members should have the ability to tackle issues head-on to avoid a negative impact on clients. Indeed, every department, team, and member should be aware of client needs and understand their role in impacting client satisfaction.
Providing the best possible experience for your clients requires your teams to remain agile and accurate to client needs. An important element of this is ensuring that team members can make critical decisions to ameliorate client issues and provide an enhanced brand experience.
Encourage team collaboration in resolving client issues in the shortest time frame. For example, if a client contacts your client support team regarding a problem, the representative should be able to pull relevant members from other teams into calls or communication chains.
Larger decisions should still require sign-off, however, this can be managed by your internal champions, who are empowered to approve them. Doing so will enable flexibility without harming the client experience or implementing counter-productive initiatives.
While often rigid, core processes in a client-centric organization are another element that requires flexibility, especially when vital optimizations are concerned. Below are three best practices for developing client-centric processes that evolve with client needs.
Perform a survey of existing processes, combined with client feedback, to identify areas of friction in the client experience and buyer’s journey. Start with your client success team and the key processes and timelines for the delivery of your services or products. From this, you can then work backward through each stage and the different teams involved in their implementation. Dissecting processes in this manner will help you to identify the key changes necessary to align processes and teams to deliver higher levels of client experience.
Given the strain on resources that personalized and data-driven strategies place on organizations and their teams, automation is a must. Automating routine tasks where possible frees up workloads so that teams can focus on providing exceptional client experiences. Consider automation across departments and processes, including marketing, sales, IT, website management, product development, and client support.
A key element of your client-centric processes is nurturing clients throughout their buyer’s journey and time with your organization. Securing a positive experience and the value of your product begins with the onboarding stage. This process should introduce clients to your products (or services) and educate them on how to get the best results possible using them. Onboarding should be as simple as possible and aim to make even more complex solutions accessible.
Be sure to align this process with the unique needs and capacity of each client and provide additional support where necessary. Attention to detail and airtight processes at this stage will have a great impact on the positive brand impression you are able to achieve.
It is crucial to anchor the development and implementation of your client-centric initiatives with well-defined KPIs and client success metrics to measure the impact of its client centricity. Below are the top three client-centric performance metrics broken down in detail.
Given the cost of acquisition versus retention (CAC vs CLTV), a nominal churn rate is ideal and often a leading indicator of positive client experience. Your churn rate is the percentage of the client base that terminates their partnership with your organization via cancellations, not renewing contracts, or unsubscribing from your service.
Four reasons why client-centric companies focus on minimizing the churn rate:
Acquiring new clients can cost up to 5x more than keeping existing clients
A 5% increase in client retention increases profitability by 25%
For most industries, the annual client retention percentage is around 20%
Companies with a higher retention rate grow faster
The key to improving retention rates is to understand why people leave, and why people remain clients. According to the Call Miner’s Churn Index Report, the annual value of client churn triggered by avoidable causes is $35.3 billion.
Three strategies to cut client churn at your company:
Upskill and empower your client support teams to address and resolve client issues on the first call. Set a benchmark for closing on the first call (85%, for example) and monitor this metric.
Provide automated solutions where the client can resolve simple issues themselves without having to rely on support.
Reward client loyalty and provide new clients onboarding benefits and bonuses
Be sure to monitor your client churn rate consistently. Any significant fluctuations should be identified and addressed as quickly as possible.
Net promoter score (NPS) is a measure of client satisfaction and loyalty that can also serve as an early indicator of churn. Each score is based on a general average of how clients respond to the following simple question:
The client responses are then tallied with the predefined scale below:
Promoters (9-10): These clients are your brand advocates and often become long-term clients. They love your product or service and are most likely to refer you to other prospective buyers.
Passives (7-8): Clients who rate you a 7 or 8 are content with the quality of your product and service but may be likely to switch to a competitor if a product that meets their needs better for a lower price becomes available.
Detractors (0-6): These clients are not satisfied with your product and service. Not only will they most likely churn, but their negative feedback can have an impact on your brand reputation and competitive positioning.
The goal of client-centric organizations is to maximize the number of clients that fall into the promoter category while minimizing churn as much as possible. Run your NPS survey every six months to review performance and leverage automation to highlight the clients that need special attention.
For companies invested in building long-term relationships with their clients, CLTV provides a fairly accurate measurement of the "health" of their relationships with clients.
CLTV is the total revenue associated with each client over their time spent with your brand, factoring in potential future revenue as well.
To calculate CLTV, multiply the annual revenue from a client by the average lifespan and then subtract the initial acquisition cost.
For instance, if a client’s annual spend is $10,000 annually, the average client lifespan is 5 years, and the acquisition cost is $1,000, then the CLTV is [(10,000x5)-1,000], hence the CLTV is $49,000.
Calculating CLTV also serves to identify which accounts to designate key resources to. CLTV at a client-centric organization should also be assessed based on elements that span beyond revenue, for example, partnerships, co-branding, or brand advocacy.
Adopting these KPIs is a key element of informing client-centric processes and ultimately driving client experience and the success of your strategies as a result.
Success in client centricity lies in the ability to anticipate client needs and delight them with a combination of product and service excellence. Hence, a client-centric organization must create products, policies, and processes aligned to enhancing the client experience.
Here are five best practices to keep in mind while implementing your client-centric strategies:
In today’s environment, client centricity is quickly becoming a necessity, particularly given the emphasis on increasing CLTV against acquisition costs. To become a client-centric company and achieve greater performance requires introspection, the development of key processes and training, as well as maintenance. A pivot to client centricity also requires transformational internal changes internally to how business is conducted at your organization and how your teams are supported under a central vision. However, the right approach can catapult an organization’s growth and resilience.
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How long does it take to implement a client-centric approach?
The timeline for adopting a client-centric approach can vary depending on the size and complexity of your business. It typically involves a strategic shift and continuous optimizations. While some initial changes can be made quickly, achieving full integration may take several months to a year or more, especially when considering more complex processes such as alignment.
What challenges might arise when adopting a client-centric approach?
Implementing a client-centric approach can come with challenges such as aligning internal processes, a significant drain on resources, and ensuring consistent client experiences. Overcoming these challenges requires strong leadership, effective communication, and a commitment to ongoing learning and adaptation.
How can a client-centric approach benefit my business?
A client-centric approach can lead to numerous benefits for your business, including increased client satisfaction and loyalty, improved brand reputation, higher client retention rates, and enhanced profitability from greater CLTV. It also helps you better understand and meet client needs, differentiate from competitors, and drive long-term business growth.
