Customer-centric Problem Solving

You don’t need a sales title to influence customer experience. You just need the right daily habits. Many professionals assume customer-centricity is the job of someone who is in - Sales - Support, or - CX teams. But in reality,  - Every email you write - Every delay you cause - Every handoff you make Shapes how the customer experiences the organisation. The gap? Most roles don’t see the customer, so they stop thinking about the customer. Here’s a simple 5-step daily routine to stay customer-centric ; even if you’re in operations, finance, tech, or HR 1. Start your day with one customer question Before opening your task list, ask: “How does today’s work reduce friction for someone outside the company?” 2. Translate tasks into customer impact Don’t say, “I need to finish this report.” Say, “This report helps the client decide faster.” Impact-first thinking changes how you prioritise. 3. Anticipate one downstream dependency Ask: “Who uses this after me?” Customer-centricity often shows up in smoother handovers and not grand gestures. 4. Scan for invisible friction Look for small delays, confusing language, or unnecessary approvals you’ve normalised. Fixing micro-friction is real customer empathy. 5. End the day by closing one loop Follow up -Clarify-Update. Customers remember responsiveness more than perfection. Customer-centricity isn’t a department. It’s a discipline practised daily, quietly and consistently. The professionals who grow fastest aren’t closest to the customer by role They’re closest by mindset and habit. #customercentricity #sales #personaldevelopment #customerexperience #salestraining #corporatetraining #softskills

Confession time: Outside-in thinking is a lot harder to maintain than it seems. Even for those of us in Customer Success. The tendency is always to drift toward inside-out thinking, 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. ____________________________________________ A process like this helps build customer-centricity in 3 ways: 1. Customers stay 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 talk to 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 2025 . It's a business imperative. That kind of outside-in thinking is what causes you to focus on customers' success instead of just Customer Success (love that turn of phrase from Dave J.). But I want to hear from you! How do you guard your org from drifting to inside-out, company-centricity?

Reflecting on a pivotal moment from over a decade ago while developing a new software product: 1. Our current clients were seeking a solution to a specific problem. 2. We decided to build a solution from the ground up. 3. I took the role of product manager and formed a customer focus group. 4. We documented all their needs. 5. My lead developer and I prioritized the list of needs for version 1. 6. I shared our findings with my mentor, who lacked technical expertise. This is where I learned a crucial lesson. His only question was, "Did you ask the customers if you have things in the right priority order?" My response was that we hadn't, as we thought the priorities were clear. He advised me to reconvene the customer focus group. The outcome was eye-opening: the feature we had deemed the most complex and time-consuming was actually the last priority for our customers. Had we not consulted with them, we could have wasted a year bringing a solution to market that didn't meet their needs. It all starts with the customer. You can't truly understand their needs by solely analyzing data and support tickets. Prioritizing the voice of the customer in the development cycle is essential, and this should be done for every major feature release or development project.

The less you say, the more you sell. The best sellers negotiate with their ears. Too many salespeople kill deals by doing precisely what they were trained to do: talk. About what? What they sell. I used to do the same. I’d walk into early meetings loaded with pitch decks, features, and demos, thinking I was impressing. What I was doing was pitching into the void. Being product-centric feels safe. You’re in control. But you’re not building trust and understanding. And trust and curiosity are what move deals forward. The shift? Become customer-centric. That’s not a soft skill, it’s a strategy. When you deeply understand your customer’s goals, blockers, and context, you’re not offering a product. You’re delivering value and a key to a very specific lock. Here’s how top salespeople flip the script: → Do your homework. LinkedIn, ChatGPT, earnings reports, there’s no excuse to show up cold. → Lead with insight. Open with something about them, not about you. → Ditch the demo. In first meetings, skip the show. Use the time for discovery and building trust. → Ask like a negotiator. "What’s costing you time, money, or credibility?" "What happens if nothing changes?" → Summarize before you solve. "It sounds like your biggest challenge is X, and you’ve tried Y without success. Did I get that right?" → Lock in the next step. Do not say goodbye before you agree on the next meeting to present a customer-centric proposal. You’re not here to pitch. You’re here to diagnose. The less you talk, the more they trust. 

This senior marketing manager who knew all the right tactics… failed spectacularly when she took her first customer-experience role… That was me. I thought years of experience with brand campaigns and digital strategies had prepared me. - Metrics? Yes - Market knowledge? Yes - Customer-centric mindset? Maybe But stepping into a role where customers were supposed to be at the centre was a brutal wake-up call. The problem wasn’t my marketing skills. The problem was thinking marketing skills were enough. Here’s what a marketing background doesn’t prepare you for in customer-centric leadership: 1. Customers don’t care about your products. Marketer love telling them how great their products are, but what they really care about is how their problems get solved. Features mean little without context in their lives. 2. Campaigns don’t build loyalty. We can spend months crafting the perfect message, but if the service fails or the experience is clunky, customers leave. Loyalty is built in consistent functional and emotional interactions. 3. Data without empathy is useless. Marketers analyse clicks, funnels, and conversions, but numbers don’t reveal the frustration of waiting on hold or the delight of being treated with care. Without empathy, data leads to blind spots. ✦ Customer-centricity is about high EQ (empathy) and high AQ (adaptability) If you’re stepping into a customer-centric role, here’s my advice: ✕ Don’t start with technology. ✕ Don’t even start with strategy decks. ✓ Start with people and create alignment across leadership and employees ✓ Learn and teach others to see the world through the customer’s eyes Because the best strategy, the boldest campaigns, and the smartest tools collapse the moment a company forgets who pays the bills: the customer. What’s been your toughest lesson in building customer-centricity? #cx #customerexperience #customerrelations

I was in a call this morning with a respected industry thought leader, and we ended up talking about one of the biggest internal challenges in Customer Success: when things go wrong for a customer, where does the blame live? Is it in Sales for setting the wrong expectation? Is it in Product for missing or broken functionality? Is it in Operations or Accounting for a confusing billing experience? There are plenty of targets, and many CS pros will instinctively point at teams across the org. And honestly, those things do matter — misalignment across functions is one of the most common structural blockers CS organizations face today. But the harder question (the one we often avoid) is this: When something isn’t working for a customer, have we looked in the mirror to see if we played a part in allowing that to happen? Customer Success has the unique privilege of representing the entire company to the customer. We build trust, advocate for outcomes, carry the company flag, and influence how the customer perceives every interaction. And with that privilege comes responsibility: the responsibility to look at ourselves first when issues arise. Not to absorb blame unnecessarily, but to approach every problem with the humility that leads with: 👉 Did we set clear enough expectations? 👉 Did we fully and accurately translate the customer’s needs internally? 👉 Did we communicate with enough context and impact to influence action? 👉 Did we partner with a spirit of collaboration rather than blame? Too often, issues become a game of “whose fault is this?” instead of “what can we learn and fix together?” When CS approaches our role as truth-teller, integrator, and co-owner of outcomes, including our own part in the narrative, the organization becomes better equipped to solve the real problem. Here are three action steps to help us get this right: 🔹 1. Self-Reflect before escalating Before sending that “Urgent Customer Issue” email, ask yourself: Did I fully understand the customer context? Did I include potential solutions or recommendations alongside the issue? 🔹 2. Translate with context, not frustration CS isn’t just reporting facts, we’re bridging perspectives. Partner feedback needs to land in a way that adds clarity and urgency, not just noise. 🔹 3. Lead with humility and accountability Admit when we could’ve done something differently. Highlight wins when the team solves something cross-functionally. Model curiosity and shared ownership rather than pointing fingers. Privilege without responsibility is entitlement. Responsibility without humility is defensiveness. When CS leads with both, we not only protect customer value, we build internal credibility and influence. Let’s keep raising the bar. 👊 #CustomerSuccess #Leadership #CrossFunctionalAlignment #Humility #ServeWell #GrowthMindset #BetterEveryDay #CSLeadership #CreatetheFuture

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. 💪

"Can you believe they completely ignored our feedback?" The prospective client's voice was filled with frustration. "It feels like they've forgotten we exist." This was more than just a complaint— and I knew right then that something had to change. We often talk about customer centricity, but how often do we truly reflect on what it means? My career started in a call center, where the customer was everything. Every call and every interaction was a reminder that the customer wasn't just a part of the business—they were the reason for it. As I've grown in my career, this mindset of "client first" has stayed with me. But hearing this client's dissatisfaction made me pause and ask: Are we really putting the customer first in everything we do? In the rush of targets, processes, and metrics, it's easy to lose sight of the customer. But when we do, the consequences are real—disconnected relationships, unmet expectations, and ultimately, lost trust. So, how can we ensure that customer centricity isn't just a buzzword but a guiding principle in our work? Here's what you can consider: 👉🏻 Listen, Really Listen: Take the time to understand your customers' pain points. What are they unhappy about? What's missing in their current experience? Truly listening can reveal insights that lead to better solutions. 👉🏻 Be Proactive, Not Reactive: Waiting for a problem to escalate is not the way to go. Anticipate your customers' needs and address potential issues before they become real concerns. This proactive approach not only prevents issues but also shows that you're not just meeting expectations—you're exceeding them. 👉🏻 Personalize Your Approach: Customers appreciate when you remember the little things. Whether it's recalling past interactions or tailoring your service to their specific needs, personalization makes a huge difference in how valued they feel. 👉🏻 Collaborate, Don't Dictate: Work with your customers, not just for them. Involve them in the process, seek their input, and make them feel like true partners. This collaboration builds trust and fosters long-term relationships. 👉🏻 Reflect and Improve: After every interaction, take a moment to reflect. What went well? What could be improved? Continuous reflection ensures that you're always aligning your work with your customers' evolving needs. Have you ever had a moment where a customer's feedback made you stop and think? I'd love to hear your experiences and any tips you have for staying customer-centric. #CustomerCentricity #ClientFirst #CustomerExperience

#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.

Well-designed cross-functional processes are powerful. They create customer experiences that are effortless for the customer and more efficient for the organization. Here's a story that illustrates this point. A colleague of mine visited the contact center for a well-known health insurance company and relayed this experience to me. While she was meeting with team members, she saw job aids referring to “building empathy” and delivering “apologies with heart.” The quality assurance (QA) form measured employees on how well they helped customers manage their intense emotions over delayed claims. The training content emphasized how to explain complicated claims processes. When she met with the contact center director, she asked, “Why so much time and energy on training reps to manage customers who are disappointed… by you? Why not just fix the claim issue?” He sighed. “It’s not that easy. The claims department has their way of doing things. We’ve tried to meet with them over this issue a few times, but the message is clear—‘stay on your side of the fence.’ We do our best, but customers express frustration every day. We can’t magically make customers okay with it.” This gap between what customers want and what is being delivered—and I suspect you may have similar stories—is all too familiar in many organizations. Customer-centric organizations, however, spend proportionally more time designing processes and proportionally less time getting better at appeasing unhappy customers. They devote their attention to eliminating what makes customers unhappy in the first place. Of course, glitches will still happen, and the processes you use to resolve those issues are essential. Effective complaint resolution will always be part of your CX portfolio. But that shouldn’t be the main focus. The challenge? Without deliberate intervention, departments don’t naturally work across functional lines. The marketing team focuses on messaging and response rates. The product management team is occupied with product design and development. Billing concentrates on revenue and collections. Each team fixates on being the best they can be within the boundaries of their department. Every department can agree that designing processes and technology with the customer in mind makes sense. Even so, being customer-focused within a silo doesn’t fix the most exasperating barriers to good experiences. Great experiences happen by design through cross-department collaboration. They are shaped with a clear-eyed view of the customer as they traverse through the work done by marketing, product management, billing, and the contact center. That work must be coordinated and seamless for the trip to feel effortless, satisfying, and yes, sometimes even WOW. And to create that collaboration, your organization must have high-level sponsorship. Senior leaders must define a common vision and goals, and hold all accountable to pursue them.