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?

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.

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.