Customer Centricity: A Pillar of Business
Core work: Building Customer-Centric Mindsets | 3 Month Journey
(Please note: For confidentiality reasons we don't mention client names in any of our case studies)
Customer Centricity: A Pillar of Business
At the world's leading science-based Agro-tech company, customer centricity is one of the main pillars of their business. While farmers are the end users of their products, the Global Capability Centre (GCCs) serve as a strategic hub to serve internal stakeholders. Making service excellence critical.
This particular challenge was related to the front line managers for their GCCs.
Since this client had worked with ARC in the past, they considered us more like trusted partners, less like vendors.
The problem statement was framed through a question: How do frontline managers across Finance, HR, Procurement and IT shift to a customer-centric mindset.
Listening to narratives with a lens of research.
The solutioning and research team at ARC are experts in understanding people's behaviour. And why they behave the way they do.
After listening to client's narrative and asking very specific questions they boiled it down to 3 simple areas of work:
Understand customer perspectives
Balance technical expertise with active listening
Embed customer centricity into everyday work.
Minimum intervention, maximum impact.
ARC designed a 3-month journey in such a way that each concept could be taken back to their workplace and applied from day one. Here are a few of the high level elements of the design:
Pre-work: Before the workshops even started, managers interviewed stakeholders. They heard the voices of their real customers. This primer context for the upcoming workshop.
“One of the participants mentioned that having these conversations already helped build a relationship of trust with their stakeholders.”
Practical tools: Through here & now facilitation of workshops by our Subject Matter Experts (SMEs), concepts like empathy mapping and business model canvas were introduced in their context.
“The Business Model Canvas helped me realise certain areas of work that I hadn’t considered before.”
Nudge Theory: By subtle environmental cues, participants were steered to the behavioural outcome outlined through a book club. The book club emphasised, “The world’s biggest problems don’t come from lack of solutions, but from organisations getting in their own way with needless complexity and nonsense." This, with interim case studies, videos, articles, and frameworks, helped apply learning in the workplace.
This made sure that the theoretical concepts became a part of everyday work.
The goal with any of our designs is to make a minimum intervention and gain a maximum impact.
Early indicators post the program seemed promising.
What shifted?
Feedback highlighted that the tools shared were directly relevant in their work, which gave managers practical ways to improve their customer service.
In line with that, participants seemed more ready to experiment with new behaviours and tools.
““This journey falls in line with some challenges I have had in my role. I appreciate the opportunity to explore tools to help me in my journey and share my customer experiences with my colleagues.””
Overall, these shifts signalled movement from “completing tasks” to building relationships and thinking systemically.
Real-time Feedback Loops
The client appreciated ARC’s agility. The frequent touch-points in the form of cadence meetings ensured that real-time feedback was implemented. This made the client feel truly “partnered” with ARC.
