In this era of increasing social media practices, the buying decisions are significantly affected by online reviews and recommendations. Embracing a customer-centric approach is the only way of dealing with the customers to gain a positive selling experience before and after the sale to drive repeat business, customer loyalty and profits.
To ponder a customer-centric approach, you need to strengthen its foundry pillars which are:
Experience- A rich experience to the new and existing clients
Loyalty – Set a goal to attain customer loyalty as a goal and measure business decisions against it.
Communication – Communication is all about personalization. It’s is to ensure personal bonding with an individual customer.
Product And Service Assortment- Considering the needs and feedbacks of the customer’s in mind while designing new services and products.
Promotions- Maintain relations with the existing customers offering new sale promotions.
Pricing- Develop a strategy for developing quality products. The high price will automatically follow the product.
Feedback- Customer-centric businesses always seek feedback, regardless of a positive or negative response.
The company like Amazon who has followed a customer-centric approach can gain remarkable profit. So, instead of the business owners and marketing experts, it is your customers who are the supreme entities of a business model and responsible for running the entire show to make or spoil a brand.
In a customer-centric approach, an employee is directly taking the instructions from the customers and producing customized products. To harvest the benefits of customer-centric culture in your organization, you can bring the following changes:
Develop a Strategy to Attain Customer Satisfaction
The interaction with the customer starts from the initial thoughts itself and continues until the final product delivery to the customer. At the core of your process, you need to change the development process which is difficult to acquire at the production level.
Many Customer relationship management (CRM) software are available which act as an interface between the companies and customers. A 360-degree view of the customer’s choice will change your development process. This change will enhance the quality of the product.
For example:
Try to understand buying behavior, interests, and engagement of the customers from the data provided. You are required to create a new shopping experience for the existing customers. You can use customer lifetime value to segment customers based on top spending customers
Not only does focusing on the customer make sound business sense, but it is a fact that customer-centric companies earned 60% more profit which had target customers.
Awareness of Changing Trends in Organization
The power shift between brand and customer happened during the economic downturn. The customers became selective of the brand, and with the rapid adoption of eCommerce practices, global brands were available at the same price in online shopping having the same amount as the local brands. The winning brands treated their customers with utmost respect, providing personalized service, and built an everlasting relationship with them.
Altogether, the customer-centric approach is a trendsetter or a business attitude which changed the way we market our products. The fundamental changes brought tangible changes such as customer maintainenace. The existing customer’s probability of buying a product is 50-60% more than finding a new customer.
Here, the most critical factor is to believe in this concept that the customer’s choice can bring a game-changing shift in business growth. Right from the development until the final stage, when employees start believing in it, it starts showing profitable results.
The social practices such as email marketing, social media sharing helps in keeping you updated with changing trends.
Customer Satisfaction is the Top Priority
As you keep the customer’s choice on top priority, it becomes challenging to control the production process. The cost of bulk production is less as compared to small production. Moreover, the customer’s choice keeps on changing, and it is difficult to keep track of it. The entire system has to double –triple the speed from the order receiving till delivery of product to provide a high rate of customer satisfaction. It requires automation at a large scale in our backend processes.
Another factor in obtaining customer satisfaction requires satisfaction of employees to serve customers with their requirements. As an employer, you should ensure the perks and benefits of employees by giving them regular hikes to make them stay for a more extended period with you. It will help you maintain your existing customers and to channelize in building new customers.
Also, the second aspect is to adopt the upcoming technologies such as email marketing to address your customers so that he remembers your brand. Chat bots, voice search and use of virtual reality-based applications are implemented on online stores to note down the behavior of the customers and to build a relationship with them.
Pat your Back at Every Achievement
We have witnessed that with online shopping, the life cycle of products is decreasing with the changing trends. Instead of the seasonal products, we have started focusing on the event-based products which have a shorter duration for sales. For example, the customized products for Christmas will be only for 2-3 months whereas the winter season products will be for at least six months. But if you compare the sales, the Christmas discount offer might give you the sales equal to the entire winter season.
So, mainly the marketing campaign is designed to target an event or a festival where the employees have to put their extra efforts in creating the campaigns, customizing the products, inventing new and creative ideas and so on. Therefore, every employee’s efforts must be appreciated, and profit must be on a sharable basis with the employees.
Employee retention is the backbone of customer-centric culture. Over some time, their employees start recognizing the behavior of the customers which play a vital role in boosting the sales and maintaining a brand.
At the same time, old employees are the asset to them, and their input is essential to communicate with the target audiences.
Get Involved to Enhance Productivity
Bringing employees onboard in decisions making for the betterment of the organization help in building a strong relationship with employees. You’ll sense a self-generated enthusiasm in your workforce when you let your employees voice their opinions. This way, you can build a customer-centric approach because the policymakers don’t have to interact with their customers directly. It is a must to understand your customer’s mind by listening to your employees. They are playing the role of the middlemen while directly approaching customers. Some of the benefits of sharing your thoughts with the employees and making them involved in making company policies are:
The employees become sincere as they start feeling that they are the part of the core process and they are working for their profit.
-The day- to- day queries and issues can be instantly resolved.
-A stronger between management and employees results in a smooth customer service.
-Morale and motivation is higher in employees.
-The managers can focus on quality if the front desk employees can handle customer’s queries.
-When the employees see their bosses taking an interest in listening to their customer ’s, and they are concerned, the sincerity level automatically increases.
Reorganize your Organization by Allocating the Right Jobs
You employee hierarchy must be perfect. They must be having the right skills and attitude to listen to the customers. But more is expected. You need employees who have the personality that is in sync with the culture. That’s different than attitude. Don’t confuse the two of them.
You need to organize your resources. When you make the changes at the organization level to build a customer-centric culture, you need to provide skill training to your existing employees who have the right attitude to develop their skills to deal with the customers. Detailed knowledge of the products and services which you are providing is must, and at the same time, they must know about competitor’s products and services. The employees must have practical skills to deal with customers who are tech-savvy and active on social media.
You must be having great employees working with you, but regardless of their amazing backgrounds, if you don’t train them to adopt the customer-centric culture, you can’t expect that they will be great for your company. Start preparing right away, focusing on employees soft skills; your customer service expectations and emphasize on delivering service matching with the company’s core values.
Celebrate Success
In a customer-centric culture, customers and employees are the integral entities. They need to go hand in hand. When everything starts working fine, let your people get their benefits.
Employees expect appreciation and respect from the higher management. Celebrate with them when they are doing a great job. That doesn’t mean a party every week. You can recognize at a weekly meeting or mention their achievement in the company’s newsletter. Or, maybe it is something big, like an annual appraisal or an extra incentive.
At the same time, when customers start responding to you by making repeated purchases and sharing genuine feedback and start showing customer loyalty, figure out those customers. It is the right time when you should reward them. You can pay your valuable customer by offering special discounts, a discount on their next purchase, and gift items on special occasions and so on.
Wrapping Up
The customer-centric approach is not limited to adopting the plan as a policy of an organization, but it’s an ongoing experience which will eventually start giving you profit. It will undoubtedly have long-term monetary and branding benefits.
So, to adopt this approach, you need to get used to an environment in which the employee must ensure customer satisfaction. They must be self-reliant on taking decisions to retain customers. By making this, a core system of working and taking care of employees including lower to high management will set a platform where you’ll be on your way to creating a truly customer-centric organization.
