How to Build a Customer-First Culture

A delightful customer experience happens at the intersection of art and science. Art is your culture, and science is your disciplines — I would argue both are equally important and neither is enough to delight customers on its own.

Companies that want to be customer-first organizations often think about things like — does our product work? Are our handoffs smooth? Can our customers get the help they need, when they need it?

All of these things are important! But they are all about orchestration and strategy, and being customer-first starts much, much earlier. “Customer-first” is not an initiative that you pursue for a year. It’s not a project. It is not something that one team should be tasked with doing.

Customer-first is a way of being. And that starts with your culture.

I think of culture as “art” because art is freewheeling, and something that the artist (in this case, your leadership team) creates. Your culture should be unique to your business, your customers, your employees, and the way you want to engage them.

Culture is what brings science — the disciplines that make your business run — to life. As Katie Burke, HubSpot’s chief people officer, likes to say, “our values live in our hearts, not in our hallways.” Culture is what empowers everyone from those in leadership to those at the front lines to make the right decisions for customers.

At HubSpot we think about two things when building a customer-first culture: Values and practices.

Culture shows up in your values…

A customer-first culture requires strong first principles. Every customer scenario is different, because every customer is different. Strong first principles make it easier for your team to do the right thing — even if they’re dealing with a completely unique situation.

At HubSpot, we only have one first principle, and it is the North Star for our entire business: Solve For The Customer.

Solving for the customer means that in every decision we make, big or small, we put customer value first — even above value to HubSpot. This principle is part of our company’s DNA.

We solve for the customer in the big, strategic decisions we make, from what Hubs we’ll build, to how we structure handoffs, to what skills we hire for.

Take the way we build our CRM platform. Traditionally, SaaS companies have expanded their core product offerings through acquisitions. This is painful for customers because cobbled-together systems with different underlying technology are hard to use. We build every Hub in house, on the same underlying tech foundation, making our product easier for customers to use and get value from.

This was a really big decision. We chose to grow in a very specific way that came with tradeoffs — for example, building in-house means we can’t launch a new Hub every six months. But we chose to put our customers first, because we believe this will be better for us in the long run too.

Your values should extend beyond the federal-level decisions. A customer-first culture should also create a shared understanding of customer value across the entire company. This empowers frontline teams to make the right decisions in their day-to-day.

…and in your practices.

To embed your values into the DNA of your company, make clear investments that give you the ability to make good decisions for customers. At HubSpot, we focus on deep listening posts and feedback loops with customers.

At a high level, we want every employee at the business to hear from customers. We start every single company meeting with a live customer interview. These aren’t conversations about how great HubSpot is so we can pat ourselves on the back. We ask customers to be brutally honest and tell us the good, the bad, and the ugly.

This practice creates a shared understanding of who our customers are, and what they care about. And, as an added bonus to the customer, it gets their pet rock issues front and center with the right teams.

We also bring the customer’s perspective into every decision we make. My favorite meeting of the month is our Customer-First meeting. Dozens of senior leaders across HubSpot attend, and we hear from a panel of customers and partners on a specific theme. This “anecdata” is paired with a quantitative analysis done through our Voice of the Customer (VoC) program. This team represents the customer’s voice when we’re thinking about making a change to the product or experience.

Practices like VoC are how we operationalize solving for the customer. “Customer voice” can mean a lot of things. We think of it as finding insightful, thoughtful customers to have in-depth conversations with. We also look at broad trends in our install base, like product usage, retention by Hub, etc. We know that we want to solve for the customer — these insights show us how to do it.

Strong values and strong practices create art

I recently heard a fantastic case study of how culture creates customer delight. This TED Talk by Jon McNeill is about his time at Tesla (2015–2018), when the company was scaling up by many multiples. The leadership team’s biggest challenge was how to preserve the customer-first culture and service quality while growing so quickly.

The team came up with a simple tagline that summarized Tesla’s customer philosophy: “Make them talk about you at dinner tonight.” They used this slogan in a one-minute video to train 12,000 employees around the world.

Jon tells a story of a Tesla service rep whose customer called from taking his wife to the hospital. Their Tesla wasn’t working so they had driven their second car to the hospital, and the customer wanted to know if he could get Tesla service ASAP.

The Tesla rep realized this customer was having a particularly difficult day, so he went the extra mile to go to the customer’s house and service the car in the driveway. And then… he went another extra mile, and bought groceries so his customer had one less thing to worry about.

This is what a customer-first culture looks like in action. There was no “my customer took his wife to the hospital” playbook. But as the rep told Jon, “I knew exactly what I had to do to get them to talk about me at dinner that night.”

Culture is truly foundational to scale. It is not just words you put on a wall at your office or a catchy phrase you print on swag. Culture is, as Herb Kelleher famously said, “what people do when no one is looking.” It’s our job as leaders to make sure that thing is what’s right for our customers.

Next, we’ll get into the disciplines of customer experience, starting with aligning your teams around the flywheel.