The Rise of Customer-Centricity: How Quality Management Can Help You Improve The Customer Experience

More and more organisations are shifting towards a customer-centric approach. Naturally, the benefits of placing your customers at the core of your business speak for themselves: happier shoppers, improved processes, and a potential 60% increase in profitability. But before you head straight to implementation, you need a strategy.

Here, we discuss the rise of customer centricity, and why quality management is at the heart of successful execution.

The rise of customer centricity

Customer centricity is all about prioritising the customer experience in your organisation’s business model. It helps you know what the customers want, so you can attract them with a unique offering. This triggers positive outcomes, like long-term customer relationships, higher loyalty and trust, and repeat purchasing. Some may also recommend your company to others.

It’s key to know that 86% of purchasers would pay more for a great customer experience, but 63% would stop doing business with a brand that employs poor personalisation strategies. Plus, 90% of companies believe customer experience is the main driver behind loyalty and retention.

With a growing number of organisations now competing primarily on customer experience, you can’t afford to get left behind. But for your customer-centric approach to be a success, you need high levels of quality management.

The role of quality management

Quality management is necessary to provide the best product or service possible. Without it, there’s no guarantee of consistency in the customer experience, which could lead to failures in customer centricity. A Quality Management System (QMS) will deliver a better understanding of your customers’ needs, enabling you to prevent issues, and ensure consistency and equity in every customer experience.

With an effective QMS, you’ll be able to supply the highest quality products and services. This is because you can maintain quality control throughout, assessing every step in the customer journey to guarantee that expectations are either met, or surpassed. And if something goes wrong or a customer complains, you can trace the issue and resolve the root cause. Ultimately, improved customer experience leads to more profitability and growth.

How to implement a QMS

That being said, it’s not as simple as just introducing a QMS into your business. First, you need to:

• Know what you want from your QMS – improving the customer experience isn’t the only benefit [5 Business-Enhancing Benefits Of A Robust Quality Management System], it’s key to set out what you want to achieve before you take action.
• Pick your tools – you’ll need to capture data as a part of the process. Think about relevant tools to gather this. For instance, you could carry out surveys with the aim of informing the QMS, and enhancing product and service quality.
• Understand how you’ll monitor feedback – feedback is a key part of improving quality. Consider how you communicate with customers and stakeholders, how you’ll track and analyse the feedback process, and how you’ll act on the results.

As you can see, a QMS isn’t straightforward. That’s why it pays to achieve certification.

Deliver the best customer experience with ISO 9001

ISO 9001 is the world’s most popular Quality Management System Standard. It lays out the requirements of a complete QMS which can be tailored to suit your business. Plus, it can lead to:

• Increased profits, and more contracts won
• Improved reputation, status and supplier relationships
• Better management of your people and systems
• Demonstration of a commitment to continuous improvement

At Centre for Assessment, we provide ISO 9001 certification to hundreds of organisations across the UK, and beyond. To find out how we can support you with achieving certification, contact us today.