An increasing number of businesses are focusing their attention on a customer-oriented strategy. There is a system in place that can assist a company in determining and organizing their customer focus.
Focusing on customer needs in a business structure can raise customer contentment, hold existing customers, attract new customers, and spike sales.
To have a customer-focused approach, start by recognizing what your customers’ wants, desires, and expectations are and form your products, services, and promotions to suit accordingly.
How Do You Build a Customer-Centric Business Model?
So how do you create a customer-centric business? If you are already running a business, what steps can you take to put the customer at the center of your operations?
Those numbers really resonated with you. You have come to understand that not having a focus on customers is preventing you from gaining devoted customers and earning more income.
You are prepared to commence emphasizing putting the customer first in your organization, however you are uncertain of where to start.
Here are some customer-centric strategies your company can follow today:
Focus on Customer Marketing
Customer marketing is not your average type of marketing.
Products and services that customers see as useful instead of what a company believes to be useful is known as customer marketing, which is popular with businesses such as Apple and Amazon.
You should have a customer-centric approach to marketing throughout the entirety of your customer’s journey, beginning from when they first purchase a product from you until the conclusion of their experience.
The foundations of this promotional strategy are to encourage people to use the product, expand its influence, ensure users stick with it, and attract new customers.
Have a look at these updated ideas for how to promote your company and give it a new identity.
- Adoption: The adoption stage begins your post-purchase process. Adoption here refers to a customer becoming adapted to a service or product. You want this product or service to become a part of their everyday lives, and you can use in-app messaging and automated onboarding among your team to make it happen.
- Retention: This next stage is about preventing churn, which is what happens when weary customers decide to stop using your products and services. This can cost the average company upwards of $1.6 trillion, so churn is certainly something you want to avoid.
- Expansion: The third stage of the post-purchase process is expansion. This is about taking the customer you have now and expanding their customer journey so you can expect their repeated business for the next year, two, even three, or more. This can be done through a variety of ways, including upselling, cross-selling, extended warranties, and more.
- Advocacy: Advocacy is about the means your company uses to convert leads so you have new customers beginning their journey. With customer marketing, you promote products and services that your customers deem valuable — rather than the ones you think will be valuable to them.
Start a Compensation Program
You can create a customer-focused strategy within your business by using a reward system. Many businesses that prioritize their customers have rewards or incentives that motivate their staff to maintain a focus on the customer.
This program links employees with customers, requiring every individual on your team to give their best.
Your compensation program should provide employees with financial rewards for their proficiency in dealing with customers or for the amount of customers that stay with you. A compensation program will incentivize all employees in your organization to make customer satisfaction their main goal since they will be rewarded for doing so.
Look into: What You Can Do to Further Enhance Customer Success
Start Hiring More Customer-Centric Employees
You can also appoint team members who prioritize customers to refine your customer-oriented approach.
No matter what kinds of roles your latest employees had before, whether in customer service or human resources, they have the skills needed for your customer-oriented business in this new customer-centred era.
Tap into Customer Empathy
Experiencing empathy for someone else does not equate to offering sympathy. When you sympathize, you empathize with someone and that’s all.
It goes beyond just feeling sorrowful to enable you to relate to them through common situations.
Having empathy for your customer involves a comprehension of the background or context of what has brought them to you, as well as what they require in the given circumstance.
You understand why they require what they do because you can empathize with them.
Viewing the customer’s predicament from their perspective enables you to rapidly find an answer to their issue that is appropriate.
If your staff are not displaying empathy yet, a training program rolled out to everyone at the organization could bring about a shift in approach.
Tips for Creating a Dynamic Customer-Centric Marketing Plan
1) Get your company and leadership team involved
Management must take the lead in implementing a marketing strategy that focuses on customers. Getting approval from your leadership team is essential in order to motivate the rest of the staff to participate.
Here’s the thing. When handling their business with your organization, customers are unaware their interactions are with multiple separate departments. For them, whoever they talk to, be it technical assistance, customer care, or sales, symbolizes your business. Consumers anticipate having a consistent experience from the beginning to the end, and that every individual they communicate with will be aware of their identity and the prior interactions.
Luckily, if you’re the one that needs to convince the CEO or the board, here are some of the latest stats from Martech Alliance on customer experience that more than speak for themselves:
- “59% of companies with a CEO who is involved in customer experience report higher revenue growth, compared to just 40% of companies without a customer-focused CEO reporting growth.”
- “Companies that excel at customer experience have 1.5 times more engaged employees than less customer-focused companies. In turn, companies with engaged employees outperform the competition by 147%.”
- “Offering a high-quality customer experience can lower the cost of serving customers by up to 33%.”
The numbers are so impressive that even the most stubborn Chief Financial Officer is probably going to be convinced.
2) Learn everything you can about your customers
In order to generate a marketing scheme that is customer-centered, it is necessary to learn as much as possible about existing and possible customers. Do not just presume that you understand your patrons or hazard a guess regarding how they perceive your company.
Buyer personas
Begin by considering your target customers before diving into preparation. Generate separate profiles for the primary categories of individuals who are likely to make a purchase from you. For instance, if you provide household services, like contracting, plumbing, or taking care of pools, you may sell your services to homeowners, or you may also offer them to business ventures. It’s possible that you may have to make a third buyer profile for bigger companies that make use of your services. Every one of these individual characters will have differing background characteristics and requirements.
Make sure that you thoroughly investigate your records and gather all the essential information for each persona. Take a look at the data on your website, Google analytics, and any analytics click-tracking systems you might have set up. That last one can be a real eye-opener. An all-in-one marketing platform such as Surefire Local’s will allow for the gathering of data and findings from all areas of your marketing campaign in order to attain a more comprehensive view of your customers.
3) Add value to every customer interaction
Shoppers desire to be acknowledged by the companies they patronize. They desire more than just a minimal effort that focuses primarily on the company’s profits. Treat your customers exceptionally well, and you’ll be rewarded with their loyalty and enthusiasm for your brand, potentially bringing in greater numbers of leads than anticipated.
An outstanding client encounter must be manufactured in the course of the entire customer experience, not just right before the end result of the sale.
Provide great content at every stage of the customer journey
You should have a strong understanding of what kinds of inquiries your customers have, their mindset, and the manner in which they speak based on the research you did on them. This provides you with the most advantageous beginning when generating content throughout all stages of your sales channel.
You must produce blogs which captivate and draw customers in at the initial stage of the sales process. These are intended to demonstrate to potential customers who you are as a business, and that you do offer the service or item that they are seeking. At a later point, you require more comprehensive material to demonstrate to them that you really do possess the answer to their troubles and how you can assist them. Eventually, at the end of the funnel, you can include examples of success stories, documents with in-depth information, and a choice to book a demonstration.
Sure, persons who use pool maintenance services won’t read a white paper on any given topic, but they’ll notice how you’ve aiding other customers similar to them. The content, as well as how it is presented to the audience, should both be customized.
Build a community
Employ what you have found out from your inquiry and monitoring of social media conversations to grow a community centered on your brand. Interact with your customers on social media platforms and provide them with answers. Ask them for their input, request their viewpoint, and have them take rapid surveys. This data is invaluable to you, and it makes them feel included and as though they are contributing to something.
You can give away free items and organize contests, if relevant, to increase participation.
Remember not to be too uptight when using social media. Adapt the content you publish based on which platform it’s being shared, making sure it’s entertaining and suitable for your company’s image.
Construct a connection to your neighbourhood by encouraging people to talk about their good experiences with your brand and rewarding them for it. This will lead to greater loyalty to your product or service. You can develop staunch patrons that will happily speak of your company to anyone in earshot.
4) Convey the value of customer-centric marketing to all parties involved
It is crucial to demonstrate to top executives the worth of marketing that centers around the needs of customers. Without their participation, it will be trickier to get the other departments of your business to collaborate with you on this, which is a mission that requires the efforts of all departments in the organization.
Keep a record of your progress from the earliest beginning to ensure you are prioritizing properly, as well as enabling you to stay up to date with higher up executives and show them the advantage of utilizing the new marketing plan for the organization. This will keep them onboard for the long term.
You can demonstrate to your customers the effectiveness of your marketing strategy through delivering an amazing experience, but there’s no need to forget to express how much you value your customers, and showing them that your priority is to always give them the best.
That really does make your customers feel special.
Place emphasis on the excellence of your work and explore how you can astound your customers and surpass their expectations. If you do, you will experience a generous return of informative leads and clients who are more than eager to spread the news about you.
How Do You Measure Customer Centricity?
How do you know you’re doing it right? These are the metrics you should start monitoring straight away.
Net Promoter Score
Find out what your customers think concerning their potential to suggest your services to other people they know by getting a rating from a 0 to 10. What would your net promoter score be?
Find out how enthusiastic your customers would be to suggest your products or services to someone else. Their answer is the Net Promoter Score.
If a customer gives a score in the range of 1 to 4 in response to a survey, this is an indication of them being a detractor. The individuals with a passive attitude will range from 7 to 9.
People who give your NPS survey a rating of 9 or 10 are considered your promoters due to their likelihood of continuing to support your company in the future.
Customer Satisfaction
You can increase your customers’ focus by looking at your overall customer satisfaction (CSAT) rating.
A method of rating based on 1 to 5 called the Likert scale is used by the CSAT. This employs psychological measurements to determine the satisfaction of your customers.
Purchase Likelihood
This metric gives an indication of the probability that customers will purchase your products or services, whether it is their first time, or they are returning customers.
Check out advantages and illustrations of customer-oriented companies, such as Netflix, Slack, and more.
Customer Lifetime Value
It was previously emphasized that concentrating on the most profitable customers is necessary, but how would one determine who they are? Through customer lifetime value, of course.
To figure out how much an individual customer is worth to your business, you need to know how much money they have spent on your goods and services during their time as your customer.
Next, use the figure you got and increase the period of the business alliance.
Determining customer lifetime value requires determining the average purchase value. Calculate the average purchase value and multiply it with the average purchase frequency rate of your company.
Work out how much you have spent on conversions, take that away from the figure you got from multiplying and that is your Customer Lifetime Value.
Churn Rate
The percentage at which individuals are deciding to no longer use your services or products is called churn rate, also referred to as attrition rate.
This is the measure to determine churn rate: take the amount of customers lost during the specified period and divide it by the amount of customers that started the time frame, then multiply by one hundred.
Let us suppose that you had one thousand patrons at the beginning of 2021. At the beginning of 2022, you lost 100 customers. So, (100/1000)*100 = 10% annual churn rate.
Those numbers really resonated with you. You have come to understand that by not taking a customer-focused approach, you are deprived of devoted customers and increased earnings.
You should start implementing strategies for creating a customer-focused organization within your business. Begin taking steps to prioritize this.
