Customer Culture: Are We Becoming 'Customer Complacent'?

I once ran a focus group for a company selling margarine. Members of the client team sat in the back room, listening to customer conversations through the one-way mirror and laughing at the mums putting “artificial rubbish” (their product) on their children’s food.

It was eye-opening to see the sense of superiority these employees felt over their customers.

Unsurprisingly, the days of margarine haters selling to margarine lovers couldn’t last – the business has since folded.

The Rise of Customer Culture

For years, I’ve helped people and companies get closer to their customers. And whilst I’ve seen a lot of behaviour similar to the margarine incident, I see it less and less. Why? First, it’s a sign of complacency in company culture – something an uncertain economic climate helps to dispel.

Second, this behaviour belongs to an era where “customer closeness” was relegated to the insights department. UX research was not an established discipline, innovation teams were not customer-centric and management simply weren’t thinking about the customer all that much.

Startup culture is also behind this step-change. It teaches us the importance of “getting in the trenches” and spending time with our customers. Large companies that began as small-scale startups (such as Amazon) attribute a significant part of their success to obsessing over the customer and their needs.

At Amazon, several of their leadership principles emphasise customer closeness, or as they call it: “customer obsession”. As Jeff Bezos puts it: “We’re not competitor obsessed, we’re customer obsessed. We start with what the customer needs and we work backwards.”

Writer and entrepreneur Bill Murphy Jr put 23 shareholder letters written by Jeff Bezos into a word cloud generator. The word “customer” appeared 443 times, compared to “Amazon”, which appeared just 340 times.

This month’s article was originally published in Branding in Asia. If you’d like to hear from me weekly, I invite you to join readers who enjoy my 2-minute mid-week newsletter.

Customer Culture is a Continuous Effort

Growing a customer-centric culture from the ground up is one thing, but wallpapering it on top of an existing culture is an entirely different beast. Many organisations have retroactively doubled down on their customer focus without breaking down negative legacy perceptions of the customer that linger internally.

As a result, many companies label their culture customer-first and take it for granted instead of helping it take root: “Of course we’re customer-first, why would we not be?”

In her book, The Way We Talk Around Here, discourse analysis expert Gill Ereaut explains that the quirks of company culture are often revealed by the internal language and behaviours of an organisation. Yet after we’ve settled in, the baffling acronyms become invisible to us and we are no longer consciously aware of the language we’re using. It’s hard to spot what you no longer see.

Ereaut explains that how we talk about customers is a critical part of our relationship with them and the customer-centric culture we build. How do we refer to them internally? How do we speak about why they chose us? The margarine company spoke of their customers as fools who were blind to the artificial ingredients hidden in their product – unsurprising, then, that their customers started to love the product less and less.

As Ereaut neatly puts it, “Some companies talk as if their customers won’t go elsewhere, but they will.”

Get Truly Customer-Centric

“We talk about customers all the time” is a real red herring of today’s customer-centric era. Talking about customers is worthless if you’re not talking with customers.

Yet talking with customers is also a minefield – here’s how to avoid common pitfalls:

Pitfall #1: “I am a customer”

If you work for the company and use its product, you will be biased towards noticing features the average user would not, and you may not be representative of the largest demographic. Don’t forget your own blindspots.

Pitfall #2: “I’ve spent time with the customer before”

For companies with highly structured approaches to customer closeness, there is the trap of thinking: well, I spent a day with a customer last year.

Apart from being a sample of one, there’s a risk the conversation you had with the customer at that time are not relevant to what you’re working on now, or that the customer’s situation has changed. A simple shift in the economic climate can send customers from “spend mode” to “save mode” in seconds, drastically altering their behaviours.

Pitfall #3: “They said they liked it”

Even in regular interaction with customers, there’s still the matter of getting under the skin of what’s been said, and removing our own biases as we listen. Are we hearing what the customer is saying or what we want to hear?

First, get a read on their emotional drivers: what motivates them? What keeps them awake at night? Then, instead of asking their opinion of the product, watch them use it.

If you really feel close to your customer, you’ll be able to empathise with them, and you’ll have an answer to the following questions: What gives them a sense of personal fulfilment in their life/work? What are they missing that your product can help solve? What scares them about using your product or service? Then, you know your customer.

This month’s article was originally published in Branding in Asia. If you’d like to hear from me weekly, I invite you to join readers who enjoy my 2-minute mid-week newsletter.