The habits and rituals of customer-centric teams

Get closer to customers. That’s the goal of customer-centric organizations. But the promise of being customer-focused can remain a distant goal without the right strategy, rituals, and methods.

Customer closeness isn’t once-and-done. It’s a continual process of discovery. Teams winning at customer-centricity have specific rituals that make getting closer to customers simple. These rituals make them uniquely positioned to continually understand their wants, needs, and preferences. With the right technology, teams can easily share key insights and embed a customer focus across the entire business.

The right daily and weekly rituals can help your team members to think like customers, advocate for their needs, and step into their shoes to produce products and experiences like never before.

Get hands-on with feedback

Your customers are always speaking to you, but are you always listening? Harnessing customer feedback and using it to drive innovation is a critical aspect of any customer-centric business.

To get more hands-on, some product and design teams dedicate weekly sessions to review key quotes from customer feedback and make decisions based on what they communicate. These sessions promote customer empathy, help teams better understand core issues, and offer the chance to brainstorm long and short-term solutions.

In practice, getting more hands-on can involve weekly feedback sessions where your team reviews three to four sources of key customer feedback while considering avenues for improvement.

With Dovetail Channels, staying close to your customers and managing streams of feedback is simpler than ever. Channels is an AI-powered solution that automatically classifies continuous feedback like support tickets, NPS scores, and more into themes, complete with summaries, and sentiment, making it seamless for anyone to pull out the most relevant insights and use them to drive meaningful changes.

Use products like a customer

You might know your products inside out and back to front. But that doesn’t mean you know exactly how your customers are using them. Customer empathy sessions help you see your products through new eyes.

In a session, give team members a customer persona and a scenario to complete tasks as if they were the customer using your products. This can help teams to identify bugs and spot points of friction.

Hubspot holds regular customer empathy sessions. Realistic restrictions are used to align the exercise with the true customer experience and through sessions Hubspot’s team can identify issues quickly, enabling them to optimize user flows and streamline offerings.

Regularly challenge your assumptions

Any team focused on the customer knows that solely relying on guesswork and assumptions is problematic. Organizations worth their salt promote data-led decision-making as a core pillar of putting the customer first.

Challenging assumptions ought to be a weekly, if not daily, ritual that helps your organization lean into data, not guesswork.

You might even hold regular sessions to challenge assumptions and ask questions such as: Do we have data to prove this? Do we have the knowledge we need to take action? Where are we relying on assumptions?

Dovetail allows your team to create a reliable, single source of truth for customer knowledge. As an AI-first customer insights hub, Dovetail lets your teams unlock knowledge, rely on data, and make better decisions across your entire organization.

Role-play customer quotes

Collecting customer feedback is one thing. Using that feedback to truly think like a customer is another. Role play can be a fun and useful way to help your team step into customers’ shoes and see things from their point of view.

As a regular ritual, some organizations bring real customer feedback to life. In sessions, teams read customer feedback verbatim as if they had written it themselves. The goal here is to help others understand the pain and frustration of customers and promote empathy. Role-playing as the customer in this way can help turn your team into true customer advocates.

With Dovetail, you can create highlight reels of customer feedback from your customer interviews, usability tests, and sales calls to hear from customers firsthand in video format and inspire more realistic role-play sessions.

Always have an empty chair

How can you ensure your customer has a seat at the table? You can quite literally give them one. Some teams leave an empty chair in every meeting to represent the customer. This helps promote the idea that the customer is important and has a unique point of view.

For example, regardless of the meeting size at Amazon, there’s famously always a spare chair to represent the customer and their needs.

This ritual is simple to implement and can help your teams humanize the customer, empathize with them, and remember to incorporate them into every decision.

With Dovetail, AI does the heavy lifting to turn raw customer feedback and data into actionable insights. That means it’s simpler than ever to understand the voice of the customer and bring that voice into every decision you make. And with Ask Dovetail which brings the voice of your customer directly to Slack and Microsoft Teams, you can ask questions and gain AI-powered answers from all the data in your insights hub.

Be the customer before you design

If your customers worked at your organization, what new products would they advocate for? That question is challenging to answer without playing the role of your customer from the outset.

At IDEO, role-playing to act like the customer and advocate for their needs is part and parcel of designing new products that will delight customers. When IDEO was helping to improve patient experiences in a large healthcare system, they first put one of their team members in the position of the patient to deeply understand the patient experience. This meant that those insights were embedded in the designs from the beginning.

Regardless of your offering, putting team members in the position of the customer from the outset means seeing things through the customer’s lens––an invaluable practice.

Promote insight-sharing business-wide

Gone are the days of working in silos. These days, advanced technology makes it simpler to gain raw data from customers, analyze it, and share key insights with stakeholders to promote meaningful changes.

To share insights regularly, use a centralized hub to gather, store, and analyze feedback for quick takeaways and actionable insights.

With Dovetail, everyone on the team gains access to critical insights. Ask Dovetail helps promote the voice of your customer throughout the organization. Even better, audio insights literally bring the voice of customers to life to help promote empathy and customer-centric thinking. With audio insights, you can even set an automation to publish a regular podcast update with the most relevant insights from every conversation––keeping everyone proactively engaged in the customer experience.

Ready to drive customer closeness and bring the customer into every decision?

Try Dovetail for free today.