7 Tips to make your brand more customer-focused
Customers are undoubtedly the lifeblood of all companies worldwide, so it isn't surprising to see many businesses prioritizing them. Research indicates that about 40% of all companies have an equal focus on customer retention and acquisition to help drive long-term company growth.
Author:Habiba AshtonReviewer:Gordon DickersonAug 02, 202126.7K Shares623.1K Views
Customers are undoubtedly the lifeblood of all companies worldwide, so it isn't surprising to see many businesses prioritizing them. Research indicates that about 40%of all companies have an equal focus on customer retention and acquisition to help drive long-term company growth. Therefore, making your patrons the center of your brand is crucial to your enterprise's long-term success. If you wish to learn more about making your brand more customer-focused, please consider the following points.
Invest In Quality Customer Service
The average American reportedly tells up to 15 others about a poor customer service experience with a brand. Therefore, it is prudent to take practical steps to ensure that your brand isn't synonymous with bad customer service. Thankfully, investing in quality customer service is an excellent way to achieve this. You can start by prioritizing exploring various ways to make your client support better. Customer-centric brands don't view customer service as a cost of doing business; instead, they think of it as a revenue generator.
Consequently, these brands typically invest in their support teams because they interact closely with customers. Investing in your customer support teams involves hiring the best people for the job, ensuring that anyone who interacts with your clients has the necessary skills, tact, and patience to handle customer complaints. Additionally, a simple pay raise for your customer support agents can provide extra motivation to do their jobs better.
Furthermore, you can maximize your brand's customer service potential by setting up self-service support systems for your clients. As such, consider creating a knowledge base on your website containing answers to frequently asked questions (FAQs) and how-to articles to ensure that clients can receive the necessary assistance. In addition, you can offer automated support to clients on your website through chatbots that can provide quick answers to FAQs. Chatbots are usually available in live chat tools, so it would be best to invest in a quality live chat on your websiteto ensure that clients can receive the best answers to their inquiries.
Solicit Customer Feedback To Improve
Clients care more about what your products and services help them accomplish than your business offerings themselves. Therefore, it is always prudent to solicit feedback regarding what you offer. Consequently, listen to your customers to ensure that you can understand your patrons' viewpoints and improve the customer experience. Thankfully, you can get quality and actionable feedback to make your company more customer-focused.
For starters, surveys are instrumental tools you can count on to bring back valuable insights that will benefit your company in the long term. As such, consider drafting survey forms and send them to your clients via email. However, ensure that you don't ask too many questions. Survey Money suggests that the connection between time spent answering each question and the number of questions is not linear. Therefore, your respondents will likely spend less time answering each question on average, affecting the quality and reliability of responses in the long run.
You can also consider phone calls to clients for a more personalized touch to your feedback soliciting. Phone calls enable you to hear clients' voices and gauge their satisfaction with a product or service based on their tone and real-time responses. However, ensure that whoever calls the customer is genuinely interested in hearing their problems and offering solutions instead of doing it because they have to. Also, studies have shown that clients are likelier to respond to calls between 8-9 am and 4- 5 pm, so schedule all phone calls within these time frames for the best results.
Make It Part Of Your Company Culture
Many business experts agree that everyone should be involved in making your company a truly customer-centric business. Therefore, it is essential to make customer focus part and parcel of your general company culture. Consequently, ensure that the customer-focused mindset and practices permeate every department and process, including hiring, onboarding, and orientation. For instance, you can state explicitly in your job posting that your company seeks employees who will embrace a fundamentally customer-focused culture. This way, you can avoid more sales-driven applicants and receive employees who align with your customer-oriented approach.
Also, involve everyone in putting customers first since it can be challenging for non-support team members to do so if they never interact with patrons directly. For this, you can make these team members spend some time in the support queue assisting clients, so they can understand them better and appreciate your customer support staff more. If you are a manufacturing or engineering business, having your technical staff interact with customers can expose them to typical client issues, complaints, and reports. Therefore, your technical team can develop new products and features with the customer in mind or incorporate them into existing products to boost customer satisfaction and retention.
Meet Your Patrons Where They Are
Call centers rose to popularity about a decade ago when companies figured out the importance of quality and responsive customer service. However, having a call center these days is just one piece of the puzzle since it isn't the only effective way to address customer concerns. Modern consumers seek urgent customer service through various channels, including apps, business websites, social media, and email.
Consequently, always ensure that clients don't have to put extra effort into reaching your brand with any concerns since you can meet them right where they are. Therefore, ensure that you are present on all popular platforms to provide quick assistance to clients, allowing maximum convenience. This way, patrons can reach out to you whenever and however they want, guaranteeing a seamless customer experience throughout all interactions.
Track Customer-centered Metrics
Measuring the success of your customer-centric efforts determines how well you are performing, so keep this in mind. Therefore, never embark on any customer-focused campaigns without any defined metrics for measurement. Instead, have metrics in place that you can track to refine your strategy as needed. Customer lifetime value (CLV) is one essential metric you can track over time to see if your customer-focused efforts are succeeding. CLV measures how much a client will spend on your business as long as they remain a paying customer. Since it costs more to acquire new patrons than retain them, tracking this metric helps you increase the value of your existing customers.
Additionally, you can track customer equity, the total value of all new customer relationships formed in a specific period. Furthermore, CLV by channel is another crucial metric worth following since it helps you monitor customer lifetime value through multiple channels like social media and paid advertising. As such, you can analyze how each medium affects your growth based on the type of customers it attracts to your company. Finally, track the net promoter score metric to measure customer loyalty over a long period. This metric measures how willing your patrons are to recommend your business to others, helping you understand overall customer satisfaction and improvement.
Anticipate Customer Needs
Future forecastingis essential to make your brand a more customer-focused business, so keep this in mind. Henry Ford, the famed founder of Ford Motor Company, famously disclosed that people would have wanted quicker horses if he asked them what they needed at the time. As such, he wouldn't have produced a vehicle that simplified clients' lives without anticipating his clients' needs.
Consequently, it is always prudent to look beyond present solutions in the marketplace for new ideas that can provide the customer with what they want even before they know they want it. Visionary CEOs like Tim Cook and Elon Musk use this future forecasting to anticipate clients' needs and provide solutions for the future. As such, today's world can enjoy the iPhone and Model X while these CEOs enjoy the fruits of their anticipation by overseeing billion-dollar enterprises.
Fuse Data With Empathy
Data isn't a problem for brands since many resources companies can rely on trends that offer insights into what consumers want. However, adopting a customer-focused approach to business involves using data more humanely and less mechanically. This client-centric approach to data can take many forms, including adding context to data and using it compassionately. In addition, you can leverage data to enhance customer intimacy by finding out who is using your products and services and what they are seeking. For instance, you can insist that your product team aligns all product updates with the relevant customer support data to ensure that any change is beneficial to those it impacts.
Also, your marketing team can adjust email content based on where each client is in the customer journey instead of sending every patron the same email. However, many companies can't use their customer-related data this way because it is siloed in different systems across marketing, customer service, sales, and other departments. Therefore, integrate all your customer data from various departments and make it accessible throughout your company. This way, your employees can have a clearer picture of customer relationships and make the best data-backed decisions to improve the customer experience.
Habiba Ashton
Author
Gordon Dickerson
Reviewer
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