How to hire for your customer centricity strategy

Having a customer-centric approach allows you to develop excellent customer loyalty, but have you considered how this applies to your hiring process?

Customer-centricity must be at the core of your business across all areas if you want to achieve customer loyalty and in turn referrals plus all possible benefits. Therefore, it must take centre-stage in your on-boarding process.

Did you know that 88% of CEO’s are concerned about their customer loyalty? Mastering this is all about prioritising hiring the right staff, who have a continuous improvement mindset, from day one.

Here’s how to harness customer centricity during the hiring process:

1. Pre-hire: Understand your customer first

We know customer experience is trending and businesses are throwing plenty of cash to invest in this strategy, but does your plan resonate from the top down? The most important step is actually before you start hiring – it’s about ensuring you know exactly who your customers are and how a new employee will engage with them, what will their communication look like? If you do not have a full understanding of this aspect, your strategy will not become a reality and will not engage new staff (which is crucial!).

2. Advertise your approach and your culture

Seeing your genuine concern for the customer above all else will be extremely desirable to candidates who want to offer valuable service to their community. This will immediately align potential candidates with your business strategy and save you time searching through hundreds of candidates who are not the right fit. Do your current employees love what they do and the way they interact with customers? If so, ask them what they enjoy most about the customer-centric approach and highlight this in your job adverts.

3. Focus on customer-based experiences during interviews

Ask potential candidates the right questions to discover their values and how they compare with your business’s strategy. Try situation-based example questions around dealing with customers in the specific position a candidate is interviewing for. It is also important to look carefully at soft skills in this stage and not just qualifications. At the end of the day, you need to choose the person best suited to looking after your customers – finding out what motivates them is key. Our top tip is learning what environment they have come from and how that allowed them to interact with customers in the past.

4. Use onboarding processes to train about customer journey

Use visual representations and learning maps of the customer journey you want all employees to utilise throughout all dealings with customers. It is also important to empower your employees to understand the process enough that they can make their own decisions based on their position within the company. Aligning values from day one with new employees allows for customer-centricity to be at the core of your strategy. This step should be extremely engaging and include, for example, demonstrations of the journey in real life, which could be done by appointing a mentor to assist with the process.

This process isn’t something that happens overnight, as customer centricity has to first exist at the core of the business before it can be stretched through all onboarding processes to ensure the selection of best candidates. The benefits are endless when done correctly.

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