Might Your Firm Be Extra Buyer-Centric?

Good customer service is no longer good enough. Successful brands need to be fanatical when it comes to understanding their consumers and solving their toughest problems.

November 7, 2020 3 min read

The opinions expressed by the entrepreneur’s contributors are their own.

If you are a business owner or business executive, please do not confuse good customer service with customer focus.

Sure, good customer service is important, but that doesn’t mean you are customer centric. If you are customer centric, you likely offer great customer service. But it doesn’t necessarily work the other way around.

As you can see, good customer service is just one of many by-products of real customer focus. It shouldn’t be seen as a one-to-one relationship, but one to many. Customer focus leads to sharper marketing and branding, improved customer experiences, greater awareness of the strategies you need to add value to your customers, and the list goes on. When a company sees great customer service as the only primary result of their customers’ knowledge and understanding, it closes the door to so many opportunities to be truly customer-centric in all areas of their business.

Being customer centric means that you intend (maybe even fanatical) to know and understand your customers so that you can solve their problems and add value. Your entire company from top to bottom is geared towards knowing and understanding your customers.

Related Topics: How to Become a More Customer-centric Company in 5 Steps

If you are fanatical about having tools and strategies and metrics and goals to better understand and empathize with your customers in order to add more value to them, then you can say you are a customer-centric company.

Search for new knowledge

There are many great strategies and tools that can help you understand your customers better. Customer empathy cards, customer segment and persona templates, customer journey and experience cards help you to get an insight into your customers. You likely have all kinds of data on you about your customers and their purchasing habits that you can use to help you understand them better, too. There are great methods you can use to uncover their wants, needs, obstacles, and frustrations. I like to use the Jobs to be Done method myself. Pick some of these tools and strategies and implement them! Do this with the intention of learning more about your customers.

Related: 5 Trends That Will Change Customer Service Over The Next 5 Years

Set goals (and exceed them!)

Decide how you will know when you, your products and services will resonate with consumers. Does this come about through higher sales, higher engagement, more and better ratings and reviews as well as additional recommendations? Set goals around these things. Measure them. Motivate and motivate your teams to achieve and exceed these goals.

Then you can say that you are a customer-centric company.

Once you get a handle on a truly customer-centric company, add some innovative ways to better serve your customers, and then watch out! Perhaps you have a recipe that will wholly propel you to the top of your industry.

Related: 5 Tips for Getting Customer Loyalty

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