Customer obsession is a company culture in which every decision starts from what the customer needs, and the business is organized to learn from customers and act on it. For a support team, feedback, quality reviews and coaching all point at the customer’s experience.
In short
- Customer obsession puts the customer’s needs ahead of internal convenience.
- Few companies achieve it, and the ones that do earn loyalty.
- It starts with feedback shared across the whole company.
- Quality assurance and coaching turn the idea into daily habits.
“Customer first” is a rule every business owner knows. Yet Forrester said in 2021 that only 8% of enterprises are actually customer-obsessed. So what does it take to join that 8%? Here’s where to start.
What is customer obsession?
Customer obsession is a culture focused on “obsessing” over the customer. The definition is broad, but customer-obsessed companies have a few things in common:
- They make the customer the center of the business. They focus on what customers want and need, not only on profit or revenue growth. That starts with customer intelligence: before you build a customer-oriented culture, you need to understand what your customers need.
Read more: Customer intelligence will build your business. Here’s why
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They build an experience around the customer as well as a product. They ask how they add value to the customer’s life. Instead of selling something that solves one problem, they create an ecosystem where everything works together for the customer’s benefit.
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They ask for feedback on every part of the business so they can improve it for the customer. Even bad reviews help.
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They use all the feedback and intel they gather to keep coaching agents and growing the support team, which improves the experience for internal and external customers alike.
Customer obsession is hard to achieve. It’s also one of the most reliable ways to build a business that lasts.
Customer-focused vs customer-obsessed
| Customer-focused company | Customer-obsessed company | |
|---|---|---|
| Feedback | Collected in surveys, read by one team | Shared with the whole company and acted on |
| Decisions | Customer is one input among many | Customer need is the starting point |
| Support | A cost center that closes tickets | A source of insight for product and operations |
| Quality | A sample of conversations reviewed now and then | Every conversation checked against customer expectations |
| Coaching | Happens at onboarding | Part of every agent’s week |
Why is customer obsession important in customer service?
In Salesforce’s 2019 State of Service research, 80% of customers said the experience a company provides is as important as its products and services. That’s why customer obsession should be the backbone of every customer service strategy.
Companies that put customers first tend to see loyal customers and higher sales. There are two main reasons.
1. Customer satisfaction. Take care of your customers and they’ll take care of you.
Customer-obsessed companies have a sharp focus on what buyers want and need. They use it to improve the experience for employees (through better tools) and customers (through better products and service). That constant improvement produces happier, more satisfied customers and a more successful company.
2. Brand loyalty. A little kindness goes a long way.
When a customer has an excellent experience with your brand, they’re far more likely to come back. In Salesforce’s 2020 State of the Connected Customer report, 91% of customers said they’re more likely to make another purchase after a great service experience. Repeat that often enough and you have loyalty.
Why customer obsession keeps getting more important
Customers have more choice than ever, and switching costs keep falling.
The businesses that win are the ones that serve their customers best. For anyone doubting whether a customer-obsessed culture is worth the investment, Forrester’s 2021 analysis put the return at at least 700% ROI over 12 years, depending on the company and its ideal customer.
Why? Because a good product is no longer enough.
Look at Amazon’s Fire Phone in 2014. Anticipation was high, reviews were tepid, and Amazon had to write off $170 million worth of unsold phones. Even a company famous for customer obsession failed when it built something customers hadn’t asked for.
“Customers have a lot of choices, which drives down prices and drives up quality,” Forbes contributor Glenn Llopis said soon after the phone’s release. “They expect higher levels of service and support, which forces companies to innovate.”
Customer obsession examples
We’re all consumers, so you’ve met customer obsession, and its absence, many times. A few well-known examples across industries:
- Tech companies such as Netflix and Amazon use constant innovation to stay competitive. Jeff Bezos credited Amazon’s success to its focus on the customer experience, saying “We see our customers as invited guests to a party, and we are the hosts. It’s our job every day to make every important aspect of the customer experience a little bit better.”
- Non-tech companies like Starbucks and Disney build their products and venues around a detailed understanding of what their customers want.
- eCommerce and retail brands such as Zappos and Lush Cosmetics became famous for their service. Lush calls its approach “the ultimate customer experience.”
What they share is a habit of turning what customers say into what the company does next.
How to build a customer-obsessed culture in 6 steps
Building a customer-obsessed culture is slow work. Put customers first, use data to make decisions, and you build a more profitable company that people like dealing with. So, how do you show customer obsession?
Step 1. Gather customer feedback and share it with the whole company
Customer obsession starts with transparency.
Ask customers for their candid opinion of your products and services, through surveys, interviews, email, social media and calls. Ask how well you meet their expectations and what you could improve. Then share the results with the whole company, including teams that never talk to customers.
Step 2. Turn customer feedback into customer intelligence
Convert feedback into insights you can act on. Not every request gets built, but customers should see that you listen and that their input changes things. That builds trust and loyalty.
Step 3. Use your findings to build a customer-centric strategy
Now that you know what customers want, plan how to deliver it. How does it change your product roadmap? Which features and services would they like? Where do they expect the biggest improvements? Involve customers in shaping the solution, then give them what they asked for.
Step 4. Fine-tune your customer operations
A product people need isn’t enough. Much of the experience comes from the service around it, so customer obsession has to show up in your workflows too.
Read more: How to improve customer experience
Agents can only focus on caring for customers if everything around them works. Fix the macros, routing, tooling and handoffs that pull them away from that job.
Step 5. Use quality assurance to check you meet customers’ expectations
Agents are your representatives, and they’re the ones who meet or miss customer expectations every day. Quality assurance checks their calls, chats and emails against a standard for great service. Most teams only manage to review a small sample, which means the conversations where customers felt ignored are often the ones nobody read. Automated QA scores every conversation against your own scorecard, so you see where expectations are missed and why. Feed what it finds into coaching for agents and into fixes for the processes behind them.
Step 6. Coach agents to keep improving the quality of service
Customer obsession training belongs inside your overall performance coaching. It gives agents actionable feedback so they can improve the service they give. And it doesn’t stop at onboarding: it should be part of every agent’s week.
Read more: How to build a coaching culture
With regular feedback and coaching, agents always know what to improve and how. That clarity drives professional growth and career progression too.
Final thoughts
One of the best ways to work towards customer obsession is to keep asking the right questions.
Real customer obsession goes deeper than a marketing slogan. It’s a way of running the company, from product development to customer service management and hiring. Focus on what your customers care about and they’ll come to know, like and trust you.
Frequently asked questions
What does customer obsession mean?
Customer obsession means every part of the business starts from the customer’s needs and works backwards. It shows up as feedback that reaches the whole company, decisions made on customer evidence, and service quality checked against what customers expect. It has to hold across the whole organization to count.
What is the difference between customer obsession and customer centricity?
The terms overlap. Customer centricity usually means the customer is an important input to decisions. Customer obsession goes further: the customer is the starting point, and the company keeps measuring itself against their experience.
How do you show customer obsession in a job interview?
Describe a specific time you changed something because of what a customer told you or needed, and what happened as a result. Mention how you found out, for example a ticket trend or a survey comment. Concrete examples count for more than saying you love customers.
How do support teams practice customer obsession?
They share ticket trends with product and operations, review conversation quality against customer expectations, and coach agents on what they find. They also fix the processes that make agents fail, so the customer gets the same good experience whoever answers.
