5 Steps for Creating a Data-Driven Customer-Centric Culture

Organizations stand at a crossroads with their marketing teams that can prove paramount to their financial success. Down one lane are those organizations that remain product-focused and concentrate on short-term metrics, such as marketing-qualified leads (MQLs)—these businesses are inhibited from seeing broader customer issues and moving to a customer-centric model.

However, organizations that lean on their marketing leaders to drive them to become more customer-centric by employing data to meet customers’ needs enable customer experiences (CX) that build loyalty, satisfaction, and advocacy. Those that use data for making customer-centric marketing decisions will ultimately contribute to organizations meeting their financial outcomes. It’s easy to see the momentum once an organization commits to this line of thinking; the 2022 Gartner CMO Spend and Strategy Survey found that marketers who reported using customer data to heavily influence business decisions are 1.6 times more likely to see greater revenue growth in their organization.

Customer-centricity enables effective CX that allow an organization to stand out effectively against a field of competitors. If this type of thinking hasn’t been adopted internally in their business yet, the next question a marketer may be thinking is simply “How?” To create a CX that produces loyalty, builds positive word of mouth (WOM), and remains ahead of rapidly changing customer behaviors, marketing leaders must shift their organization’s data use toward an “always on” customer-centric orientation. The shift to customer-centric data use enables the organization’s leaders and employees to focus on data-driven CX that deliver ongoing customer-centric outcomes.

The move to customer-centricity has both short-term and long-term benefits for marketing leaders and enables a competitive position in CX that sets up the organization for success financially. Marketing leaders should follow these five practices to use their customer data to drive customer-centric strategies that inform their financial and operational results:

1. Champion customer research and voice-of-the-customer (VoC) data. VoC and user research programs will help you fill data gaps in your personas and journey maps, reduce risk and squandered resources, and deliver improved outcomes. User research enables you to understand not just what your customers do, but also why and how. It also helps you determine if the product or service you have delivered will add the value that your customers seek.
2. Support the use of personas and journey maps. Personas serve as fictional representations of groups of customers. Organizations that have persona development initiatives in place for three or more years are two times more likely to exceed management’s CX expectations. Personas help your organization understand who the customer is, their values, behaviors, preferences and frustrations. Journey maps provide context for deciding what, when and how you need to deliver experiences that resonate with your personas. Importantly, the use of personas and journey maps offer insight into how your customers find, evaluate, buy, use, and become loyal to and advocate for your products and brand.  
3. Disseminate customer insights throughout the organization. No organization can be customer-centric if employees are disconnected from customer insights. Employees must have access to, and be encouraged to act upon, the insights you have obtained. Utilize common internal informational vehicles and channels, such as your intranet, digital collaboration tools, and team meetings. Ensure that marketing teams can develop reports, dashboards, and alerts so that customer data is dispersed throughout your organization.
4. Realign and refine corporate goals and metrics. Ongoing evaluation and refinement will help your organization consistently offer value to your customers. Your vital personas and journey maps will lose their relevance and ability to deliver a competitive advantage if they are not refreshed and revalidated. You must also consistently monitor customer feedback and analytics to identify areas of friction and understand what your organization does—and doesn’t do—well. Enact a systematic approach to analysis, optimization, and utilization of the insights so that it becomes a fundamental part of how your organization operates.
5. Continue to monitor customer trends. Helping your employees be more customer-centric requires that their individual performance measures reflect your customer-centric corporate goals. This is especially important for top-level leadership, whose decisions have a much greater impact on the experiences of large numbers of customers. Without this adjustment, employees might understand the importance of CX and their role in it but find that CX competes with the priorities impacting their performance assessment and subsequent raises and promotions. 

Customer-centric organizations give greater attention to data-driven metrics such as customer satisfaction, likelihood to recommend and repurchase, share of wallet, churn or retention rates, positive sentiment in social media, and referral volume. Use your customer data to drive better customer understanding that leads to improved financial and operational results. Your C-Suite will thank you!

Chad Storlie is senior director, analyst, at Gartner. Storlie assists clients with identifying the strategy and approach for their customer experience (CX) and customer experience management (CXM) programs. Alongside strategic development, Storlie researches customer-centric culture, segmentation, analytics, data, voice of the customer (VoC), and employee experience to bring about lasting and enduring CX that benefits organizations and customers alike.