Reasons Why Customer Centricity Is Important For Every Businesses

Dinesh Thakur

15 Jun 2021

Why Customer Centricity Is Important?

Entrepreneurs are motivated to start new businesses for a variety of reasons, including passion, money, fame, glory, and independence. Regardless of the reasons for starting a business, all businesses have one thing in common:

If you are not able to retain customers, you won't survive.

And, from this simple statement, you can see the importance of being customer-centric as an entity. Any business that forgets about customers is destined to fail. They'll build the wrong products, invest in the wrong resources, and lose goodwill with their valued customers.

A customer-centric brand demonstrates the polar opposite. Every member of the team pays attention to clients and works toward the same goal. As a result, the company creates products that satisfy consumer demands, anticipates customer desires, and provides a level of service that keeps consumers coming back and spreading the word about the brand.

So, how can you keep pace with the challenges of today's workplace? Create a customer-centric culture.

Customer-Centric Culture

If your objective is to become customer-centric, there's one sure fire way to make the value spread like wildfire through your firm. Make it a core value by including a customer-focused core value, you provide an element that the whole team can get behind. Literally putting your value up on the wall and your webpage commits the concept to your leadership, your entire team, and your customers.

Customer-Centric Marketing

Customer-centric marketing involves incorporating customers into a company's marketing message. Marketing teams can provide supportive, useful content to consumers even after they've closed using tactics like inbound marketing and customer advocacy. This converts consumers into promoters who refer new customers by word-of-mouth.

Customer-centricity isn't limited to the marketing strategies. This technique can also be adopted by the sales team, resulting in a more customer-focused strategy.

Customer-Centric Selling

Customer-centric selling focuses on the needs and expectations of prospects rather than the company's or the sales rep's. Customer-centric sales reps will regularly share useful content and insights on social media rather than simply responding to incoming inquiries from prospects. Rather than cold-calling random customers, they participate in thought leadership by attending events to expand their network.

And when someone helps our customers, we celebrate as a team because a win for our customers is a win for our team.

Take a look at the steps your team should take to become customer-centric in the next section if you're looking to develop the same strategy for your business.

How To Become Customer Centric

Customer-centricity, as previously said, starts with the company's culture. If you want to be customer-centric, your company must make a company-wide commitment to the success of your customers.

The steps below explain what your organization can do to make that commitment to your customers.

1. Anticipate Customer Needs

There's a great quote from Henry Ford that says:

"If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses."

Ford is saying that if he had only listened to what customers thought he could build, he wouldn't have built a car. He was thinking light-years ahead of his competition, and for that reason he created a product that anticipated the market's future needs.
Ford knew what the customer wanted before the customer knew they even wanted it — that's a game-changing business move.

While most customers can reliably describe what they want right now, predicting what they want in the future is extremely difficult for most people. They depend on businesses to do the legwork for them and predict their needs, as well as make helpful recommendations.

2. Collect Customer Feedback

It may seem self-evident, but in order to build a great, customer-centric business, you must engage with your customers often and on a regular basis.

There are many opportunities to gather feedback in today's digital world. Here are a few ways to connect with customers that you may already be using:

• Chat
• Email
• SMS
• Phone calls
• In-app messages
• FB Messenger
• Message boards

Today, valuable communication can take place on a variety of platforms.

Every department should be using all available communication channels to learn more about customers, and the sheer volume of quantitative data you receive from these messages can be extremely useful in adjusting your product roadmap.

However, there is a level of qualitative input that you must actively seek out. While the aforementioned correspondence is almost certainly already taking place at your business, user research might be something you're overlooking.

Here are three customer research techniques to consider if you're not already:

3. Conduct a Survey

You can get insight and track your performance by notifying your customers that you're not perfect. The world's most successful businesses understand the benefits of surveys, and by conducting a regular customer satisfaction or product survey, you may provide a channel for valuable input.

4. Launch User Testing

Ask any designer the value of user testing, and they'll sing their praises. Usertesting.com and Hotjar, two modern digital marketing tools, give a straightforward framework for collecting input from real people about your product. This might assist validate your hunches and direct your labour toward the highest-impact projects in your quest to develop a customer-centric business.

5. Make Direct Calls

Do you have a friend that prefers to talk on the phone rather than text? That friend appears to be one of your closest confidants, in our opinion. An interaction outside of the digital arena is more personal, and you may get a more robust type of feedback from clients by just picking up the phone.

6. Be Easily Accessible

We all know the concept: make it difficult to contact support, and you'll spend less time servicing those difficult customers.

There's a huge financial and time expenditure used in servicing customers, so many brands (especially digitally-built businesses) hide their support behind many layers of pages.

For instance, try to find a phone number on Facebook's Help Page. It's nearly impossible. They'd rather communicate through help articles and live chat before giving out their number.

7. Meet With Customers In-Person

The lack of feedback from in-person meetings is one of the most serious plagues confronting modern businesses. Daily, direct human contact occurred simply because it was a necessary element of business. If you wanted something, you went to a store, spoke with a salesperson, and purchased it there. A company could utilise this information to improve the customer experience.

8. Provide Proactive Customer Service

Providing your customers with added value that stretches beyond the point of purchase is one of the best ways to set your company apart from its competitors. This demonstrates to them that you care deeply about providing a positive customer experience and would go above and beyond to do so.

Including proactive customer service features is one way to add value. Proactive customer service provides your customers with resources to help them solve problems without having to contact your company for assistance. This allows them to solve basic problems without having to wait for the customer service team.

9. Adopt Customer Service Tools

Your brand's experience with customers is just as important as the product or service you offer. Customers want more than just a sale; they want to enjoy the entire purchasing process. Even if your product is excellent, customers will be attracted to competitors who can make customer interactions enjoyable and productive.

Adopting the appropriate customer service tools is critical to providing a customer-centric experience. These tools assist customer service representatives in establishing streamlined, omni-channel support systems that provide consumers with immediate solutions to their problems. Customers are more pleased as a result of the company's investment in their short- and long-term performance.

10. Look Beyond the Purchase

The goal of your company, at the end of the day, is to get customers to buy your product or service. Customers who have already purchased from you should be encouraged to do so again. After all, research shows that acquiring a new customer costs almost five times as much as retaining a current one.

In A Nutshell

If you want to create a customer-centric culture, you should not 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.