What does customer-centricity really mean and why is it so vitally important in all aspects of our lives?

More than thirty years of earning my living from helping people forge better relationships with their customers has convinced me that in order to improve how we deal with customers in our professional lives, we need to improve how we deal with people in all areas of our lives.

We need to rethink how we deal with people generally. The approach simply has to be holistic as well as sincere. Anything less will not work.

Indeed, if we’re to make the most of ourselves in every respect, we must continually refine our skill at interacting with people, and I mean the people in our personal lives as much as to those in our professional lives.

If we don’t continually refine our skill, we are likely soon to find ourselves as much without good friends and good personal relationships as we are likely to be without commercial customers.

That great eighteenth-century literary gentleman and practical philosopher, the legendary Dr Samuel Johnson, observed:



If a man does not make new acquaintance as he advances through life, he will soon find himself left alone. A man... should keep his friendship in constant repair.



And he was, as usual, right. And indeed, what applies to friendship generally applies to customers generally: that is, all the customers in your life. We all need to keep our relationships with our customers, in every area of our lives, in a constant state of repair.

In order to help us think about the notion of the customer in this new, broader, way we need a correspondingly broader definition of ‘customer’ than the usual one found in the dictionary and employed in everyday speech.

Here’s a definition I suggest:



A customer is any person, anywhere and in any capacity, whom you want to influence to want what you are offering them.



This broader definition of the customer has the advantage of being flexible, and infinitely extensible. Use it, and suddenly our whole understanding of the customer becomes different, more alive, more exciting... and more likely to lead to specific and definite benefits for your customers.

I don’t only mean the customers you have in your professional life. We all have personal customers as well: by this I mean ‘customers’ using the broader definition I suggest above. What you offer your personal customers might include: your friendship, your love, your support, your guidance, and your attention generally in all kinds of ways.

Notice that the definition I offer of the customer is about you wanting to influence someone to want what you are offering them.

Merely influencing someone to like what you are offering them isn’t enough. No-one is going to buy something from you merely because they like it; they have to feel they need it, and they’re only going to part with their hard-earned cash to buy what you offering them if they really do feel they need it, either because they need it at a practical level (such as a vital spare part for some domestic appliance), or because they need it in order to feel good in the way that they want to feel. This might apply, for example, to a favourite food product, drink product or some other product they regard as bound up with the quality of their life.

WHAT DO YOU THINK?