Building a Customer-Centric Culture: why it matters
Create impact on business metrics by implementing a customer centric approach
Hi, I'm Raff Di Meo. I'm a Product Designer with over ten years of experience. The products I have designed are used by the biggest retailers in the world, from Amazon, Adidas, Uniqlo, Nespresso and more. I started this publication to help designers start and grow in their careers by sharing tips, advice, and insights about design.
In the previous article, we looked into design processes, how to best use them and how they fit within the overall aim to create a more customer-centric culture. In this article, we want to explore more about the why.
View the previous article here.
Why should we fight for customer centricity?
The answer is simple: to increase revenue, help businesses achieve their goals, and of course, fulfil user needs and goals.
Many companies achieve good results, close deals, and make money. This is what a business is set to perform. What if the business can achieve more? What if there’s a differentiator that can allow the company not just to have good results but extraordinary results? What if a business can change people's lives for good?
Customer centricity is the differentiator.
McKinsey wrote an extensive report in 2018 based on five years of research that analysed millions pieces of financial data and linked those to thousands of design actions. This led to the MDI (McKinsey Designer Index), which analyses the characteristics of businesses that show excellent design practices that contribute to creating business value.
The results showed that those companies with excellent customer centricity have far superior business performance, generating higher revenue and higher returns for their shareholders.
Customer centricity allows businesses to work closer to their customers, understand them further and identify needs, goals and pain points necessary to create products and services that people buy. Customer centricity can allow businesses to increase sales, improve customer satisfaction and reduce costs, generating exponential business value.
Starting from design maturity
When you work in a company that sees designs as a screen factory, the conversation about customer-centricity needs to start from a completely different level. Telling your manager, often in product, marketing, or technology, that designs can help with the revenue target might seem abstract and far from adding the icon to the screen they need now.
How do we engage managers and stakeholders?
I have found the conversation around design maturity very helpful in showing the business the steps to take to customer-centricity.
InVision has created a categorisation to identify companies’ design maturity, which shows how you can strengthen design culture and perception across the business. Through comprehensive research, they have built five levels that span from companies that use design to create screens to companies that see designers setting the vision of the whole business. That’s where we want to get, and that’s what’s best for the business.
You can find a recording of the talk about design maturity level at InVision here.
Each level describes how the design practice looks and what impact designers can make in the organisation. By putting you and your company on this matrix, you can see the steps you need to take to grow your maturity level.
L1 Producers - Designers are concerned with Pixel pushing and only designing screens. They create wireframes, visuals and prototypes, which means they can only contribute to the product's aesthetics.
L2 Connectors - Here, designers start to branch out and connect to other teams through conversations and workshops, nurturing a good level of collaboration that helps contribute to customer satisfaction, not just aesthetics.
L3 Architects - Designers start to get more systematic in their practice by introducing things like design systems, and they work closer to the product to contribute to the vision and strategy. Therefore, they get involved in high-level organisational conversations and can impact revenue.
L4 Scientists - Designers get very scientific about how we make decisions, and there’s a lot of testing and learning involved in the day-to-day practice. Data becomes vital to guide decisions and unlock key business benefits.
L5 Visionaries - Designers drive business strategy and look into the future, setting the pace for company direction.
Stepping stone
In many of my jobs, agency and in-house, I started from a producer level. I have noticed a middle level between the so-called ‘Producer’ and ‘Connector’ when designers go from simply designing screens to caring about usability.
At this stage, designers run or get involved in usability testing, measuring their designs against users’ needs, goals and pain points. This is a crucial step when designers show the importance of users, bringing them fully into the design process and decision-making, and they can start growing maturity to the next level.
Measuring focus and impact
Whatever the level, there are two main things I find particularly useful when it comes to describing a company's design maturity. It’s the design focus and impact.
The focus is what designers do on a day-to-day.
This goes from being constantly in Figma pushing pixels to other activities focusing more on users’ needs and goals. They start conducting usability testing, then participating in generative research, expanding to running workshops, and participating in C-Level meetings to shape the company strategy.
The impact is what designers influence.
This usually starts with measuring the design effectiveness and usability, growing towards impacting the customer experience, then business profitability, expanding to revenue and the shape and culture of the entire business.
So, think about what you do daily and where your impact is visible. Once you know that, you can start planning to change focus and impact.
Putting the foundation in place for customer-centricity
So, if you find yourself in a company that doesn’t understand customer centricity, looking at a design maturity model can help you plan the work you need to do to take your company closer to your customers and build a more customer-centric business - or at least a better design practice to start with. But changes do not happen overnight, or at least it never happened to me that way. It takes time. But, when you know what is missing in your design practice and understand the business goals, you can create a plan to introduce key design activities to help your business grow and mature your design practice.
In the following article, we will explore further how to get started, and I will share what worked for me both in the agency and in-house when I started to take the business towards customer-centricity.