Rangan says there’s an element of both art and science to delivering great customer experiences. “Art is your culture. It is how your employees think about customer value and how they make decisions for the customer. Science is your discipline. It is the methodology that delivers a customer-first mindset. At HubSpot, this means aligned teams, aligned strategy, aligned systems and aligned incentives.”

Break down internal silos to place customers at the center

At HubSpot, Rangan’s team places customers at the center of their go to market strategy through their Flywheel team model. The Flywheel team includes Rangan’s direct reports (Marketing, Sales, and Customer Success) as well as cross-functional teams that support the customer experience like Product and Finance, and meets biweekly to track progress against the annual plan.

“The top benefit of aligning this group has been breaking down silos so we can be truly customer-in,” Rangan says.

Many companies operate with a function-out mindset rather than a customer-in mindset. Function out strategies optimise for a specific purpose or function, rather than optimising around the customer. Customer-in strategy starts with customer needs and builds your internal processes to match those needs.

What gets measured gets managed

Online small business platform Xero is one organisation that knows only too well how powerful it is when a business aligns around customer needs. Born in the cloud, Xero has naturally always had a digital-first strategy. Xero relentlessly tracks customer experience using a series of metrics and external research, and uses a net promoter score to measure success. It also gets to know as many of its small business customers, developers, accounting, bookkeeping and app partners, as possible.

The customer is represented at the highest level at Xero with the CCO directly involved in developing business strategy and making investments, with the customer always at the centre. “In the CCO role you must put yourself in your customers’ shoes and think about what they expect from you. The information we get from talking to customers helps us develop products, improve processes and deliver value. I find it particularly useful to talk to customers who have identified gaps in their experience - it’s the best way to fix a problem fast,” says Xero CCO, Rachael Powell.

Ultimately, staying abreast of changing customer expectations and having the ability to respond quickly is essential to remaining relevant to customers. Partnering with like-minded organisations and ensuring as much of your workforce has a connection to the customer as possible will set the business up for success now and into the future.

HubSpot is a leading customer relationship management (CRM) platform for scaling companies. To learn more, visit http://hubspot.com