Building a customer-centric culture to support Customer Experience 

The approach towards developing Customer Experience can differ a lot from company to another. Various factors, such as customers and their needs, geographical location, industry, culture, trends, and employees have an impact on which strategy is chosen to develop Customer Experience. Indeed, it is a big decision – whether to build your Customer Experience strategy around efficiency, easiness, excellence, or even feelings. Yes, feelings can be considered as the strategic approach, because while digitalized services or ease-of-use can be taken for granted, customers will remember how you made them feel. 

Here at Lindström, ensuring great customer experience starts with each Lindströmer. Our We Care culture is fundamental to us all: When we care for our people, they will shine and support our customers to grow and shine, too! Customer Experience is created by our employees – no matter whether they work – in Sales, Production, or Finance. Therefore, everyone has their own role in caring for our customers.

From awareness to commitment

Building a customer-centric culture is a long process. It requires everyone in the company to go through their own learning curve and realize how great of a role they have in caring for the customers. Lindström’s CX (Customer Experience) Week, which was organized for the third time this year, is a great example of how customer-centric culture is developed bit by bit.

It all starts with awareness. Our first ever CX Week 2018 was oriented at establishing a company-wide understanding of the role of Customer Experience in everyone’s work. It also encouraged our employees to perform even more activities for the customers.

CX Week 2019 took the customer-centric culture to the whole new level by strengthening customer experience ownership through participation. A company-wide Perfect Day mobile game engaged all employees into completing customer experience related activities, regardless of the function they work at. A total of 647 customer experience actions were completed in the Perfect Day game during October and November 2019 by all Lindströmers. We also got a chance to welcome a topical guest speaker Thomas Kolster to join us in exploring the topic of how a sustainable brand can offer excellent customer experience in the CX Week main event organized especially for our customers.

Finally, this year’s CX Week was something really special. The final step of adopting change and building the customer-centric culture is commitment and, therefore, co-creation. For CX Week 2020 our country organizations independently planned and executed various activities – customer webinars, filmed thank-you videos for the customers, gave out partnership diplomas, sustainability awards, and customer gifts… The level of engagement and excitement was absolutely incredible! And it all originated from the people themselves, not forced upon them like something extra, proving that customer experience really is everyone’s business.