6 Practical Ways To Increase Customer Centricity — CSM Edition

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As a customer service manager, it’s vital that our customers feel engaged. Engagement leads to advocacy, trust, and ultimately a way for us to learn and think more like our customers.

But how do we do this? How can we influence this at our organizations? Here are 6 ways.

1. Share news about your customer’s business success on internal channels. This allows sales, marketing, and even the product teams to see what’s going with the customer and it could spawn great ideas for ways to increase expansion, increase advocacy, and have a general knowledge of what’s going on with the customer.
2. Create a Slack (or Teams) channel where you share ad-hoc feedback, good and bad, that you receive from customers. It’s really powerful but can also be misused. As CSMs, we need to ensure that this is kept professional and used appropriately.
3. Champion a program for colleagues to help out in customer-facing roles. There are many ways to do this but the end result is what matters: a real-world view of what customers are asking for, their goals, their personalities, and how a true advocacy is built will enlighten your colleagues and give them an entirely new perspective.
4. Invite a customer to share their story at your next all-hands meeting. This one has to be done very carefully, but put yourself in the shoes of your customer. You are letting them shine. You are allowing them to share their expertise. You are allowing them to talk about themselves. And in the process, everyone in the company gets to see (and hear) this.
5. Invite a customer to an event where you are sponsoring, and showcase their product/service. There is nothing more valuable to a customer than them feeling valued, honored, and for a free opportunity to showcase something they love.
6. Actually use your customers’ products/services. As a CSM, I have done this and it’s extremely gratifying when you use their product or service in your own business. Honestly, this has created bonds that I never knew could take place. You are essentially deepening the relationship, giving them a vote of confidence, and driving new and exciting conversations. I can’t say enough how this one is so vital. Note that this has to be sincere. You need to be able to use their product/service in your business and not just do this out of “kindness”.

There are obviously a lot more ways to do this. I have experienced all of them and in each case you learn something new. Customer success managers are like really good coaches. They want to see their customers succeed and always add value. In order to do so, it means the entire company needs to involved but the CSM can champion this as part of their overall strategy.