Customer culture

Definition

"Customer culture is a set of shared values that place lasting customer satisfaction as a priority objective"

G.Antonietti, D.Ray. (Culture Client ! Réussir sa transformation. Pearson 2022)

Customer culture is not the experience felt by the customer

No strong customer experience without customer culture

Customer culture isn't just about standards and processes

Customer culture cannot be decreed, it has to be built.

Customer culture is both organisational and individual

Concept	Definition	Associated indicators
Customer Culture	The beliefs and values shared internally that guide behaviors toward lasting customer satisfaction	COS®
Customer Satisfaction	The customer's overall assessment of their experience	CSAT, CES®
Customer Loyalty	La fidélité et la propension à recommander	NPS®, CLV

Too many companies promote a customer-centric message without this translating into real internal behavior. This is called customer washing: a superficial stance that delivers neither value for the customer nor performance for the company.

For example, the biased use of satisfaction metrics can even become counterproductive if employees, focused on their numerical targets, try to influence customer responses rather than genuinely improving their experience.

Customer culture within an
organisation

The level of customer orientation has a direct and indirect impact on the company's overall performance.

Developing a genuine customer orientation within the company helps to improve customer satisfaction in three ways:

Improving the customer experience

Improving the performance of innovation policies

Greater employee commitment

Customer focus

Perceived customer orientation

Customer experience

SAT

Customer satisfaction

FID

Loyalty

NPS

Recommendation

Profitability

Customer focus → Perceived customer orientation (CO) → Customer experience (CX) → Customer satisfaction (SAT) → Loyalty (FID) → Recommendation (NPS) → Profitability

Customer focus improves the perceived customer experience, which generates satisfaction, strengthens loyalty, supports recommendations, and boosts profitability.

The importance of this is well-documented: a study of over 7,500 French companies confirms that customer focus significantly improves financial performance, measured by profit and EBITDA per employee (Pekovic & Rolland, RAM, 2012).

Companies that adopt this approach before their competitors gain a greater competitive advantage, which erodes over time for those who lag behind (Kumar et al., Journal of Marketing, 2011).

Based on over 50 projects involving more than 120,000 employees, our field data confirms this: we observe a 2- to 5-point increase in NPS after one year of implementing a customer-centric culture project at Kiabi.

“With the COS In Mind program rolled out to all store managers, we have strengthened our mindset and further developed customer-centric reflexes. Each leader has all the necessary tools to sustainably develop their entire team.” Patrice Le Roux, Sales Director, Southern France, Kiabi

The
scientific
foundations of our approach

Measu
ring an organisation's customer orientation

Many researchers have already studied this question: Han et al.(1998), Appiah-Adu and Singh (1998), Luo et al. (2008), Kumar et al. (2011), Pekovic and Rolland (2012).

The three main components identified are :

Strategic impulse from top management

Measures the exemplarity of management in terms of customer orientation, the confidence they inspire in making the right customer decisions, and the impact of the performance indicators put in place.

Connecting the organisation to customers

Measures the quality of the link between the company and its customers: processes for listening, analyzing and sharing customer information. For what operational purposes? How does the organisation adapt to customer feedback?

Autonomy

Measures the freedom of action of teams when faced with specific customer situations, the flexibility of processes for handling customer requests, and the nature of efforts deployed to maximize the customer experience.

It is on the basis of these 3 levers that we have built our diagnostic measurement of organisations

Measu
ring an employee customer orientation

Daniel Kanneman (2011) highlights in his work the 2 thinking systems of our brain, System 1 (spontaneous) and System 2 (reflective). His research shows the influence of System 1 on our preferences, decisions and behaviors: time pressure, cognitive load and fatigue. In a professional environment, System 1 thoughts indicate what we prefer to do spontaneously, and can make our day-to-day work easier or more difficult (Rydell & McConnell, 2006).

According to many scientific trends - James (1899), Bargh (1997), Nørretranders (1998) - the proportion of our behavior that is automatic.

Our System 1 is therefore the default thought system for over 90% of our behaviour

Spontaneous customer orientation (System 1) can be measured using a so-called implicit method (Implicit Association Test), based on classification tasks performed very quickly so that responses cannot be checked, thus avoiding the need to mobilize System 2 (Greenwald et al., 2004), (Gawronski & Payne, 2010). Applied to customer orientation, this test reveals the level of effort an employee will have to make on a daily basis to think and act customer-oriented.

If he's spontaneously customer-oriented, he won't need to mobilize his System 2, and will therefore be more efficient and less tired in his day-to-day work.

This distinction between spontaneous and deliberate customer orientation is at the heart of the individual COS® diagnostic.

It is from these five levers that we have built the COS® Company diagnostic, our tool for measuring an organization’s customer orientation.

Customer culture, a sustainable foundation for organizational performance