If you want to succeed in the marketing or design business, it is essential to focus on your customers. Without them, you have no business. It may seem like common sense, but all too often, companies get wrapped up in their own internal struggles and forget the people who keep them alive.
This post will explore why focusing on customers is the key to success and what you can do to make sure you’re putting your customers first.
What Is Customer Focus?
Customer focus is a corporate strategy that prioritizes customers in decision-making. Instead of focusing just on earnings, customer-focused firms make decisions based on how those actions affect customers. It’s a long-term approach for cultivating loyalty and trust.
Customer-focused businesses work hard to understand and meet their customers’ demands, provide exceptional customer service, and incorporate customer feedback into product design and other business decisions.
Different Ways of Building an Effective Customer Focus Strategy
Every engagement should be oriented toward the best interests of the consumer. You must be thoughtful about how you deal with your consumers on a regular basis. This becomes increasingly difficult to scale as your company grows.
The tactics listed below will help you increase your company’s customer focus.
Encourage collaboration
To become a customer-focused business, teams must collaborate to provide a consistent, superior experience.
Over 70% of customers expect companies to work together on their behalf. As a result, cooperating effectively on behalf of customers requires a connective tissue layer that connects client data across departments.
This allows teams to share information without interfering with their job. On the other hand, collaboration should not stifle your teams’ productivity because it simply complicates things for the consumer.
Improve by applying feedback
Another crucial aspect of becoming a customer-focused organization is managing consumer feedback.
Customer-focused businesses magnify the customer’s voice and use their feedback to improve the customer experience. Create a feedback loop with your customers to nurture a two-sided business relationship. Setting up a customer portal will accelerate feedback collection and organization, as well as foster collaboration.
Combine data with empathy
Thanks to the growing amount of available data, companies no longer have to guess what their customers want or make decisions for them.
Instead, they can look at what’s going on in the market. Taking a customer-centric approach to data, on the other hand, does not imply that data should be exploited mindlessly.
Instead, it entails mixing data and empathy. This means that businesses can utilize data to improve customer intimacy by learning more about who is using their product and what they want.
Below are several examples of businesses that have succeeded by focusing on customers.
Starbucks
Starbucks’ loyalty program is an example of an effective way of increasing efficiency without sacrificing product or service quality.
It offers in-store pickup and a variety of discounts and other incentives to encourage return visits.
This is a significant value-add for clients who want to avoid delays caused by lineups. Members who use the app have access to the same amount of customization accessible in-store, as well as the chance to skip the wait and pick up their drink at a predetermined time.
While these clients benefit from lightning-fast service, other less time-sensitive customers can still enjoy Starbucks at a comfortable pace.
Amazon
Amazon’s sales are primarily based on curated recommendations. According to recent statistics, personalized recommendations on Amazon’s website account for 35% of overall purchases.
These suggestions are based on the customer’s purchase history, things in their basket, items they recently viewed, items purchased by others who bought a similar product, and more.
This sophisticated algorithm generates enormous revenue for Amazon while also making purchasing easier for customers.
While not every company has the resources to collect and handle data on the same scale as Amazon, the bottom line is that personalization provides significant benefits to businesses through improved consumer experience.
AndCards
AndCards is a coworking space management platform that powers more than 100 flexible workspaces in 35 countries worldwide.
It is a niche pioneer in the customer-centric approach. The company places customers on top of it all and takes care of what’s really essential for coworking space operators – members who come to those spaces to work and spend their money.
Apart from standard administrative tools for coworking spaces, andcards provide many functionalities that help coworking business owners create excellent member experiences.
Those solutions include trendy members’ apps for instant availability of all workspace services and a bunch of community features, such as:
- Community newsfeed
- Events showcase
- Visitor check-in
- Contactless-door unlock
- Passwordless Wi-Fi join
Such an innovative approach makes AndCards customers more successful as happy members tend to stick with brands longer and purchase more services. Below are several challenges of focusing on the customer and how to overcome them.
Understanding customer expectations
A company covers a wide variety of clients. Every customer is unique, and they all have different product and service expectations. Their aspirations, expectations, and must-haves are all different.
While numerous solutions are available, keep in mind that text messaging is the next generation of consumer communication.
You must make a serious effort to grasp what your customer wants from you. The greatest method to comprehend is to communicate with your consumers on a regular basis. Listening to their worries, sometimes even need informal communication in order to solve their problems and to satisfy them. You can choose whichever communication method is most convenient for you.
Choosing the right tools and platforms
For each business, selecting the appropriate tools and channels is critical. Choose the correct ones and resources to make customer engagement easier.
Select the appropriate channels to support your business’s use case, such as: phones, virtual phone numbers, email, live chat, and community assistance are among the options.
You may also divide the channels into tiers based on the amount of money a consumer owes you.
For example, for free or low-value clients, you can provide self-serve support and email for mid-value customers, live chat and 24/7 email, and high-value customers, phone and previous additional channels. Customer service is an expensive endeavour, so use it wisely.
Hiring and training service professionals
Customer service is a relatively dynamic career option, with customer service specialists staying with one business on average for less than a year.
So, don’t hire customer service staff based on their ability to communicate effectively. They should be hired because they can relate to your company and fit in with your culture.
It’s just as vital to hire the proper candidates as it is to train them to fit your company. You should teach them about your company’s culture, policies, business procedures, and customer service methods.
The right employees will save you more money than you think, so pick your customer service representatives carefully, as they are the face of your firm in front of customers.
Summary
Your business was (ideally) founded on an idea that appealed to your target market when you first started. You identified your first consumers’ demands and devised a solution to meet them.
According to Esteban Kolsky, an unhappy client will tell 15 or more people about their bad experience. Still, a pleased customer will only tell six or more people about their good experience.
Your goal is to understand your customers, become their friend, and be the first person to receive and act on their positive and negative feedback. This will allow you to tailor every connection with your members, anticipate their new needs, provide the most satisfactory answers, and earn their brand loyalty.
Author: Andrew Horbachov
Andrew Horbachov is an SEO specialist at AndCards, specializing in link building and studying germanic languages translation, interested in coworking software and its impact on user experience at the flexible workspace.
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