Not many people understand customer focus and its importance. Some businesses still have a hard time with it, and we don’t blame them. Grasping and delivering great customer experiences is far from easy. What is the point in having many customers coming to your business when you cannot convert them because your customer focus is unclear?

Customers expect a personalized, timely, and rewarding experience. Follow this strategy if you want to provide your clients with that experience.

5 Steps to a Great Customer Strategy

1. Create a customer-focused culture

How do you build a customer-focused culture?

To start off, you must ensure that every sales employee who communicates with your customers, is familiar with the marketers’ initial promises. Your team should be on the same page when handling a customer, to prevent losing them due to different promises.

Here are 3 tips on how to build a customer-focused culture:

  • Listen to your customers — You must truly understand their needs to deliver a better experience.
  • Make space for ideas — Being a boss doesn’t mean you should come up with all the ideas. Instead of being a boss, be a leader, and create an environment where you and your team will make great ideas happen.
  • Appoint a customer-focused executive — A “Chief Customer Officer” is a must to design a client loyalty program and run training sessions with employees to improve customer experience.

Following these tips will help get your business on track in no time! 

2. Utilize a CRM system to provide a personalized customer approach

CRM (customer relationship management) — is used by many professional businesses to maximize communication between departments and deliver better customer service.

In the past, only large corporations could afford to invest in CRM software, but nowadays, that isn’t the case anymore. Businesses of all sizes can afford and take advantage of this software.

Using a CRM software can immensely boost your business growth, so don’t hesitate to invest in it.

In point 1, we talked about making sure every sales employee knows how to approach a customer. With the help of quality CRM software, sales agents will be more aware of how to approach a client based on their customer journey so far.

More benefits of owning such software are:

  • Tailoring sales pitches for higher conversion rates
  • Making a planned approach based on customers interests
  • Providing a more personalized service

3. Foster long-term relationships with your customers

Customer retention should always be placed as a number one priority, no matter your industry. Having a long-term relationship with your customers will ensure that they will search for you whenever they need your services. 

Consider these 5 simple ways to improve your customer retention:

  • Meet the customers’ expectations — Don’t overrate or underrate your service. In both scenarios, the only result will be disappointing the customer. Advertise your business so it creates realistic expectations for the clients, and when you deliver the expected results they’ll be ecstatic.
  • Deliver more than promised — Go above and beyond the expectations of your customers, and surprise them with something the wouldn’t expect. Who doesn’t like good surprises?
  • Improve with change — Change is nothing to be scared of. Good companies never stay in one position for a long period of time. Update your service, offers, and processes to keep your customers around for longer.
  • Provide a personalized service — At the center of every relationship is the engagement of one person with another. Address your customers by name, smile, make eye contact, add them to your loyalty program. Most importantly, BE HUMAN! Don’t just recite a script, provide a normal quality conversation with the customer.
  • Accept customer feedback — Ask and adjust your product based on customer feedback. You can never improve unless you ask your clients about their opinion on what you do. Just do it!

4. Sell Value to your customers

Rather than focusing on products and prices, focus on selling value. In the eyes of your customers, you must be a valuable ally who provides them content, knowledge, and insight. What we mean by this is — be an educator, not a salesperson. 

The best performing value-based selling examples don’t even look like sales pitches.

The beauty in this method is that you simply give, give, and give. Introducing them to your knowledge will make them trust your experience. Subconsciously, you will have already won them as a client.

5. Focus on the customer’s experience

What is the point of a good sales pitch when your customer experience is worse than your competitors’?

Nowadays, before a person buys a product, they do in-depth research to find the best service provider. 

You must make sure it’s you!

There are 3 stages you should focus your attention on when improving your customer’s experience:

  1. Touchpoints — Social media posts, brand awareness, website user experience, company’s blog, etc.
  2. Interactions — Communicating with sales, online support messaging, sending mail, filling out a form.
  3. Engagement — Signing up for a free trial, freemium, webinar. Buying a product or service.

Providing excellence at every stage will lead to great customer experience in the end.

TL;DR

Establishing the perfect customer experience is a big challenge for many companies. 

At the end of the day, you must improve human interaction, so you can create a bond between your brand and your clients.

Be committed, understand how your product/service impacts the lives of your clients, and seek opportunities to maximize its benefits.

What your business needs is:

  • Better customer service
  • CRM software
  • Long-term relationships with customers
  • Value to provide to your customers
  • Great customer experience

Good luck!

Illustrations Source – www.freepik.com