What is customer focus strategy?
It’s hard for companies to keep up with the level of disruption across most industries. Not to mention the constant evolution of modern-day customers and why they take certain actions or engage in inactions. To excel, operations are aligned according to customer needs.
In recent decades, businesses have invested in digital transformation to achieve sustainable growth, save on costs, and boost efficiency.
What is a customer-focused strategy all about?
Going into business your world must revolve around one thing, “the customers.” That explains why you occasionally receive survey or feedback pop-ups while navigating through the platforms of your favorite brands. The same goes for the customer feedback role, a big part of the support team staying in constant touch with their customers. Getting closer to customers is not just a matter of installing CRM systems but also finding smarter ways of increasing customer satisfaction.
What is customer focus theory?
Customer focus theory puts customers at the heart of everything in a company. It’s based on achieving superior performance metrics by investing in customer loyalty, satisfaction, retention-rate, and profitability.
What are the main principles of customer focus?
Know your customer
No strategy is effective until you understand your customer. In simple terms learn more about them. Conduct market research, collect customer feedback, and listen on social media.
Personalization
Show customers an empathetic side of your business—act like you care. The best way to express this is by treating customers as individuals rather than mere numbers on a spreadsheet. Personalization of customer needs tailors your communication and how you deliver services to match their profiles and preferences.
Delivers value
Fixate on the product above anything else. It will save you a ton of money on promotion in the long run rendering advertising. As Elon Musk says, “If you make a great product, it will market itself.” Top-quality products that deliver real value get word-of-mouth marketing and other forms of customer advocacy.
Be accessible and responsive
Can your customers find you when you need to? Do you have a presence on multiple channels where most users spend their time? Can you be contacted by email, phone, or live chat? Do customers get quick responses when they reach out? Ideally, the goal is to have yes as the answer in all cases.
Honesty and transparency
Today, credibility sells, and how can you implement this? Run an open and transparent shop. Purchase policies must be clear, and pricing must be very straightforward without any hidden costing that catches customers off-guard. Social proofing your business with trusted review sites is a good way to start.
Building relationships
Invest your time in long-term customer relationships rather than one-time transactions. Effective loyalty programs incentivize engagement. Further, give follow-up services after-sale services. Maintain a healthy level of communication to achieve customer satisfaction over time.
Feedback loop
Customer feedback loops directly influence business decisions, including the collection of feedback. It shows customers that their opinions matter by acting on them.
Employee culture and training
Help your employees understand how customer focus is important. Train staff members to handle customer interactions with great respect, care, and professionalism. Build a culture where team members are responsible for delivering customer satisfaction.
Why does customer-focused strategy matter?
Improves customer retention
Customer retention has a threefold impact: it increases profit margins, reduces churn, and fosters loyalty to your brand. Every new customer comes at a cost known as the customer acquisition cost, or CAC. If they make return purchases, you are getting more sales at zero expense, which is a key marker for a profit-making or future-profit company.
Harvard Business Review stated in an article that getting a new customer can be 5 to 25 times easier than keeping an existing one.
Photo by Blake Wisz Unsplash
Customer satisfaction
When companies prioritize the needs of their customers above anything else, the customers effectively become brand advocates. When customers are satisfied, they are also likely to return it and engage in customer advocacy, resulting in recommendations.
A Zendesk study shows that 73% of customers will switch to alternative competitors if they frequently experience bad service.
Competitive advantage
Almost every product out there has a competitor today. Customers have options. Being unique or different gives you an edge. The best way to sustainably achieve this is by being customer-focused in your engagements, interactions, marketing, and service delivery.
Forrester shows that brands with a powerful customer experience generate 5.7% more revenue than those that are lagging.
Higher revenues
Customer-focused businesses see a rise in sales from repeat purchases, high transaction values, and word-of-mouth referrals. Naturally, customers are open to high premium payments to get better services and tailored experiences.
Repeat customers can increase the total revenues of a business by 40%, according to a study by Bain & Company.
How can you build a customer-focused culture in your business?
Commitment to leadership
The leadership of companies exhorts instill the right values where customers are at the center of everything they do. On their part, the leadership with put customer satisfaction at the core of decision-making, communication, and actions.
Employee engagement
Recruit and train staff members who are committed to customer service. Ensure the training programs place a lot of emphasis on empathy and problem-solving. On a structural level, your employee hiring can provide customer satisfaction metrics.
Feedback loop
Find ways to get feedback from customers using forms, surveys, talking directly, and social media. By constantly consuming this feedback you remain in sync with the market adjusting their products and services to achieve better outcomes. Give employees an audience they can pass along insights from their everyday customer interactions.
Customer experience designs
Map out complete customer journeys that point out all touchpoints while assessing customer experiences at every stage. Customize customer data to achieve highly tailored and personalized experiences.
Measure performance
You can use customer experience software to generate customer satisfaction scores. Metrics like customer lifetime value (CLV) and Net Promoter score (NPS) are important indicators for businesses.
Ways businesses can implement customer-centric marketing strategies
Develop customer profiles—Using interaction or browsing information create a persona of existing customers and use it to better understand their needs, behaviors, preferences, and pain points of customers. It simplifies work on the sales teams.
Personalize customer interactions—rely on customer data to personalize your marketing messages, offers, and content tailored to individual preferences.
Boost customer experience—invest in SEO optimization on your website, mobile, app, or physical store. Further, make it easier to navigate your product catalog with sales enablement chatbots like Lookfor.
Prioritize customer service—give customers real-time round-the-clock service through automated workflows and virtual assistants like Lookfor.
Have a customer feedback system—utilize surveys and feedback forms to collect insights on customer satisfaction and areas that require improvement. Monitor the social media mentions on your brand and understand customer sentiment while responding fast to emerging issues.
How does quality assurance help improve customer satisfaction?
Quality assurance (QA) has a direct link with happy customers. A report by Zendesk shows that quality assurance processes help in improving the quality of customer service.
Examples of customer focus strategy in action?
We shall look into some of the customer-focused initiatives implemented by top brands globally.
Case Study: Apple
When it comes to customer care, Apple is the father of all customer centric approach. They actually build the famous YC motto "Make Something People Want" and started to talk with their customers before releasing the first iPod. When you need support, Apple will be waiting for you, no matter who you are. The Apple Store experience is unique with its attention to customer details, free workshops, tech support bar, and much more. Services like Apple Care+ give customers warranty extensions or other support services. What’s more, you can get in touch with the support team on the phone, website, or physically at the Apple Stores.
Case Study: Zappos
Zappos is an online shoe and clothing retailer with a customer strategy fixated on customer happiness. All customer inquiries are responded to immediately by the service team. As part of the company culture, customer support teams are strongly incentivized to spend as much time with the prospects until they find the right product. Other customer-targeted moves, like the introduction of free shipping, remove the risk of buying shoes online, significantly boosting customer trust and satisfaction.
Case Study: Amazon
Amazon, famous for its marketplace, is one of the top customer-focused companies. Actions like one-click purchasing are meant to reduce the maximum amount of friction experienced navigating across the website before checking out. Further, it allows social proofing where customers can remain and review products purchased openly and transparently. Subscribers to Amazon Prime get free 2-day shipping, a great way of retaining customers who want to get as many products as they can during the window. Plus, all customers get a personalized experience depending on their likes and tastes.
Key takeaways: Customer-focused culture always wins
There are countless examples of how customer-focused companies perform way better than their competitors. One prudent way of making this happen is through automation. If you are looking to meet customer expectations, get hold of a software solution like Lookfor for you Shopify store.
