Convenience. We value it more than I think we sometimes realize. We’re willing to pay more for it, and we’re willing to sacrifice quality in exchange for it. So it stands to reason that delivering convenience for our customers can lead to a pretty profitable equation for retailers.

The threshold for inconvenience continues to get ever lower. We often complain about how many clicks it takes to get to what we’re looking for on a web page. Think about that for a moment. The energy required to cause our index fingers to press a button too many times is irritating. Some might say it’s not the energy, it’s the time. OK, fair enough. Then the “waste of time” threshold starts kicking in when we are forced to wait three to four seconds for a page to load. We’re busy! We haven’t got that kind of time to waste!

But this post isn’t a social commentary. It’s about recognizing an opportunity to serve customers and grow our businesses.

So, how can we focus our businesses on the convenience opportunity?

“Defending the status quo is what kills companies.” That insight from Rich Teerlink and Lee Ozley’s More Than a Motorcycle rings just as true now as it did when they wrote it in 2000. They described how Harley-Davidson didn’t wait for a crisis to change—they transformed their culture right after a financial turnaround when the company was being praised for its success. Most would have stayed the course, but Harley knew that holding onto the status quo is the surest way to fail.

In today’s fast-moving world, companies that cling to “what’s always worked” run a serious risk of being overtaken by more nimble, customer-focused competitors. The names of companies that didn’t evolve—Kodak, Blockbuster, Nokia, and much of the music industry—are stark reminders of what happens when businesses fail to adapt to new realities.

What does it really mean to create a customer-centric culture ? We hear companies say it all the time. Almost every claims to have it. But what does it really mean and how do you know if you really have it?

Culture is a powerful and interesting beast. I’ve had the opportunity to observe and operate within many corporate cultures. I’ve learned that corporate cultures cannot just be decreed from the top as cultures get their power from all of the people within them. While CEOs and other leaders can be influential in culture development, they can also be completely enveloped by powerful cultures that are driven from all levels of the organization and formed over many, many years.

That said, I believe there are certain dynamics that drive cultures, and we can influence and shift cultures by focusing on these key areas.

Without further ado, here are what I believe are the four key facets of a truly customer-centric culture:

Focusing and delivering on all layers of the Employee Hierarchy of Needs can lead to the type of employee satisfaction that leads to customer satisfaction and big profits (investor satisfaction?). But there’s no question that it takes constant focus and a lot of hard work.

As truly amazing as the human brain is, it’s not able to re-process everything we see anew every time we see it. So, our brains take some shortcuts by basically ignoring things we are very familiar with, and that can cause us trouble any time we have interactions with people who don’t have the same level of familiarity with something as we do. I usually talk about this in reference to customer experience but it actually applies to many areas of our lives.

To illustrate the concept, I have my Tree Stump Theory…

Think you don’t make emotional decisions? Think again.

It turns out that without our emotional brains, we wouldn’t be able to make decisions at all. In How We Decide, Jonah Lehrer recounts the story of a man whose brain injury caused his amygdala to stop functioning. As a result, he was utterly incapable of making even the simplest decisions in life. Without an emotional brain to push him toward a decision, his rational brain simply went into analysis paralysis.

Our brains are extremely powerful, but they’ve got a lot going on. As a result, they basically compartmentalize processing power and take shortcuts when encountering situations that seem similar to past situations they’ve encountered. While this compartmentalization is generally very efficient, it has its drawbacks.

Acquiring new customers is hard work, but turning them into loyal customers is even harder. The acquisition efforts can usually come almost solely from the Marketing department, but customer retention takes a village. And all those villagers have to march to the beat of a strategy that effectively balances the concepts of bought loyalty and earned loyalty.

I first heard the concepts of bought and earned loyalty many years ago in a speech given by former ForeSee Results CEO Larry Freed, and those concepts stuck with me. They’re not mutually exclusive. In the most effective retention strategies I’ve seen, bought loyalty is a subset of a larger earned loyalty strategy.

So let’s break each down a bit and discuss how they work together.

Most digital commerce channels are still achieving single digit conversion rates even though customer intent-to-purchase rates are 20% or higher in most cases. Customers are continuing to run into obstacles to the purchase process that need to be eliminated. The good news is that during this time of limited capital investments, retailers can use low cost means to find and eliminate as many obstacles to purchase as possible.

The first step is to get into the right mindset and remove what I feel is the biggest disconnect with the customers that many retailers have:

We’re way more comfortable and experienced with our own sites than our customers are.

We use our sites every day, and we know exactly how they’re supposed to work. However, our customers are generally nowhere near as familiar with our sites as we are.

The Customer Engagement Cycle plays a central role in many marketing strategies, but it’s not always defined in the same way. Probably the most commonly described stages are Awareness, Consideration, Inquiry, Purchase and Retention. In retail, we often think of the cycle as Awareness, Acquisition, Conversion, Retention. In either case, I think there are a couple of key stages that do not receive enough consideration given their critical ability to drive the cycle.

The missing links are Satisfaction and Referral.