How do you Build a Customer Centric Business?

Most businesses focus on being product-centric, leaving their customers outside their decision making process. Customers are the reason most businesses are still existing and standing today, and acquiring customers is one way of measuring success in a business, maintaining and retaining the customer is the main deal in business.

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Customer centricity is a way of bonding business that fosters a positive customer experience at every stage of the customer journey in your business. In most businesses today, it is difficult to make money by just selling products and services to customers. Stand-alone products and services commoditize rapidly and collapse profit margins. The new foundation of profitability is the customer relationship.

Customer centricity in business helps the business to build products that meet customer needs, anticipate customer wants, and provide a level of service that keeps customers coming through the door and advocating for the brand to other people. To embrace customer-centricity in your business, you’ll need to create a strategy that enables you to collect meaningful information about your customers, as well as address their needs throughout the customer journey.

1. Know what the customer wants.

A solid understanding of customers’ lives, motivations, and aspirations is the first step to improving customer experience and increasing value for customers and organizations. Learning from customers is the entry point for designing more effective products and services. Although every member of a customer-centric organization is responsible for thinking about customer needs and experiences, it is the research team that regularly draws insights from customer information. Insights can come from existing interactions between customers and tellers or agents.

2. Design the experience.

A customer’s perception of the brand is based on what they see, hear and sense, these initial impressions need to be supported by empowered employees and business processes that minimize customer efforts. Businesses should carefully design their sales, marketing, and customer care processes. Once these touch-points are understood, they can be designed to specify exactly what you want the customer to perceive at each touch-point.

3. Optimize your marketing strategy.

Your marketing efforts should focus on the customer’s needs, and a marketing team should use data, industry knowledge, and a deep understanding of the customer to set the right priorities. With a better sense of customer needs and behaviors, there are many ways to optimize a marketing strategy. One of the most significant risks for marketing and sales efforts is that you will spend time and resources sharing a message with an audience that doesn’t care or misses your point. A customer-centric business seeks to understand the real needs of customers and their motivations right up front.

4. Invest in customer service training.

Not everyone gets it right all the time, we at some point need an expert to shape and remind us the right bearing to follow, training customer service resources in a customer-centric business should involve a lot of focus on the concept of empathy. When your service agents can empathize with the customer’s position, they will genuinely want to make the situation better. A training program that reinforces complementary skills like active listening and how to ask thoughtful questions can make a huge difference in customer satisfaction.

5. Reward your team.

Happy employees in your business automatically result in satisfied clients. When the team you are working with is satisfied, they tend to be motivated in delivering at their best, they also have the customer in mind as their top priority, most customers will always come back, especially when they have been given quality services by the business team.

6. Look beyond the purchase.

At the end of the day, your business’s goal is to get customers to purchase your product or service. However, when customers buy once, you’ll want to ensure they buy again. After all, studies show that it costs nearly five times more to attain a new customer than to retain an existing one.

But, how do you motivate your current customers to purchase from you again? Well, the best way is to provide them with added benefits that extend beyond the point of purchase. These benefits should help customers achieve their goals and create a more memorable customer experience. By doing so, customers will begin to associate their success with your business’s products and services, this will automatically make them come back again to your business. For instance, when a customer purchases a product from you and you give them free tutorials on how to use the product, the customer will never forget this experience.

7. Create a customer onboarding process in your business.

One of the best ways to improve and make your business grow is by setting a detailed customer onboarding process whereby, before the customer makes a purchase you and your business team should introduce the products and services to the customers and explain to them how to use them to fulfill their specific needs. Each customer’s needs will be unique, so your team should personalize this process to ensure every customer is properly set up for success, your team can’t abandon customers after you make a sale. Instead, make sure your customers get the most from your product and services. That way they’ll be more inclined to return to your business when they’re ready for an additional purchase.

Also Read:

1. 8 Tips on how to market to the Millenials.
2. Shift from Traditional to Digital Operations in Manufacturing Industries.
3. What to consider as a Business before venturing into new markets.

Touching a customer’s soft spot goes beyond giving quality products, it’s a matter of how often they will come to purchase your product and build brand loyalty with your business, making your business customer-centric should be the number one priority, know what your customer needs, design the experience, optimize your marketing strategy, invest in customer service training, reward your team, look beyond the purchase and lastly create a customer onboarding process in your business.

Mombasa, Kenya.

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