Modern day customer experience is delivered across an ever-growing array of digital and in-person touch-points. But to truly understand how they are perceived by the customer you need to implement a customer centric culture.
CX is no longer just delivered through the call centre or front of house staff. Interactions occur through personalised email campaigns, chatbots, social media and third-party websites.
As a result, leading companies across the world are investing in efforts to embed a customer centric mindset into every level of their business. For good reason.
Improving customer experience by just small amounts can reap huge rewards and tens of millions of dollars annually by reducing churn and increasing customer re-engagement.
To do so it is widely believed you need to “eat your own dog food” or dogfooding. This phrase was coined by microsoft and refers to those within the company thoroughly using and experiencing their own products day to day in order to gain an insight into their customer’s experience with the product.
Here are 3 great examples of major companies which are going above and beyond to instil the importance of customer centricity into their organisation.
1. A CEO that really Delivers: Customer Centric Culture at Doordash
What if your pizza was delivered by the CEO of DoorDash?
In 2021 the online food delivery company announced that ALL employees, from engineers to top executives would be required to participate in food deliveries at least once per month.
Why?
The goal of this initiative was to instil a “customer obsessed mindset” within the company. This is done by bringing every employee closer to the customer. The belief being that they can make the company 1% better every day by having a clear understanding of customer pain points and interactions through direct feedback from the customer
2. Giving customer feedback a Lyft: Lyft Ride-sharing
The US-based ride sharing platform is prized for it’s friendly service which sets it apart from other ride-sharing apps. While it’s direct competitor, Uber has faced a number of scandals this has become a competitive edge for the company.
This could be attributed to the customer centric mindset of the Lyft CEO Logan Green. Green regularly logs into the app and picks up passengers on his way to work. This method allows him to sit directly next to the customers. Putting him in touch with what their driver partners experience when they use the app.
Lyft’s ‘Dogfooding’ program extends to all it’s employees with every employee required to do at least 4 hours of driving for the ride-sharing app each month.
3. Comparing apples with apples: Apples
Of course Apple being the innovative tech giant that it is, it’s at the forefront of dogfooding. Not only do it’s entire staff utilise apple products for their day to day work. But updates to software are immediately road-tested on it’s staff.
The designers would watch a different member of staff using the operating system, identifying issues or needs and then that very evening iterating a new version of the operating system and watch a different member of staff using this new version.
For a truly customer centric culture, ALL employees must play a part in customer experience, together.
But great customer experience requires more than just a company-wide effort — it requires cross-functional collaboration and fewer silos. A good place to start is to make sure there’s a highly visible place (such as a Slack channel) for any employee, across any function of your company, to submit opportunities to improve the customer experience and cross-functionally propose and design solutions.
Do you want to improve your customer experience? Let’s discuss the ways you can deliver an outstanding experience. Reach out to discuss your options with us.
