How did I help PickCells to create a customer-centric company culture?
It has been more than 4 months that I proposed to the team to create the company’s values and purposes in order to guide us in this customer-centric path. However, I wait until now to see the results so I could come here and write about it.
Just to put in context, PickCells is a young startup, proudly saying, a health social startup. When I started at PickCells, we were building our products, we did not have clients paying for our services, we had partners, we did not have a big office, we had an entire coworking to share with other startups, we did not have a culture, we had people.
Isn’t that enough? Yes, it is enough!
For me, as a customer success professional, I truly believe in the importance of having a customer-centric company. I truly believe that this is the key to succeed in the business world. But, I had to check with my team with that was their belief as well. That leads us to step 1:
Show facts and examples
As a first step, I knew I had to show what Customer Success is, why it is important and how it works.
Everything I do with or for the team, I think is a major rule to envolve everyone, so I asked for each person to bring company’s names that they admire, and here it comes the answers: Netflix, Zappos, Disney, Google, Magazine Luiza, Slack, Amazon, McDonald’s.
Surprise! All those companies are customer-centric!
To endorse my arguments I used those company’s culture mixed with some customer-centric definitions plus the Agile Manifesto, which is already practiced daily in our office.
In the end, I asked the team whether create values based on customer centricity makes sense for each one personally. The answer was yes.
It is important to say that everyone in the company, including de C levels, were participating. Everything made sense for them as well.
Passed a few days…
I had to come up with some dynamic presentation, again, I couldn’t do it alone, couldn’t figure out all the values and company’s purpose by myself and, once more, it was mandatory to involve everyone.
Step 2:
The two hours meeting
I had to say that I planned this meeting to be only one hour, but everyone was so involved with the goal of this meeting that we spent two hours discussing the company’s future.
Do you remember the companies we were inspired for in the first step? I divided it, randomly, among the team. Each person would have 1min and 30seconds to talk about the aspects they most liked about the company they had in hands.
After that, our CEO, Paulo, made a tiny pitch: What is PickCells in one minute?
Later, we started our brainstorm, using post-its and time-box (it was ignored in some moments).
We came up with our values and mission with these simple questions:
- Based on what PickCells is, what does PickCells do?
- If PickCells does not exist, the world would be worse because…?
- So why do we do what we do?
- How do we do it?
The result
As a team, together, everybody at the same time, we figured out that:
What PickCells does is…
PickCells uses science to create technologies and solve impact problems, democratizing sustainable access to health.
Our mission, our purpose
We want everyone to have access to diagnostics and not suffer or die for lack of them.
Our values, what guides us
We invest in the growth of people;
We value fellowship and respect;
We like to debate and listen to multidisciplinary opinions;
We focus on our customers and social impact solutions;
Highly adaptable and versatile;
Science, technology and innovation are in our DNA;
All that information has been guiding the company’s decision in various aspects. New features for the products, new partnerships, new employees, feedback culture, solving intern conflicts…
If you want to apply, start a customer-centric company or just have a more deep conversation about the topic, get in touch, I will be happy to share all the material I used.
