Its all about loyalty!

Customer satisfaction is worthless. Customer loyalty is priceless.

– Jeffrey Gitomer

Customer focus means your business is dedicated to providing goods, products or services that are useful and relevant to consumers. Understanding what your customers want will help you to adapt and evolve with the times. As times change, so do customer needs. Your business should be flexible and should continue to evaluate service and product quality.

Customer needs drive the focus of the company. Businesses often see a need and this is how their idea turns into a firm. It is important to continue to repo with consumers to ensure that this focus is intact.

Business that understands the needs of their customers and are dedicated to providing customer focus will always have a big slice of cake. Consumers need to feel that your product is worth buying.

Observe what competitors offer that you do not and improvise on what you have to offer that they do not. This will help you to understand where the consumer is coming from and you may be able to make adaptations to your services to meet the need of the consumer more efficiently.

Customer centric is not just about offering great customer service, it means offering a great experience from the awareness stage, through the purchasing process and finally through the post-purchase process. It’s a strategy that’s based on putting your customer first, and at the core of your business.

For example:
You can use customer data to understand buying behavior, interests and engagement they are looking for.

You can identify opportunities to create products and services for your best customers.

You can use customer lifetime value to segment customers based on top spending customers and provide them with loyalty rewards.

Not only does focusing on the customer makes business sensible, but research by Deloitte and Touché found that customer-centric companies were 60% more profitable compared to companies otherwise.

The challenges of becoming a customer centric organization

The power shift between brand and customer happened during the economic downturn. Customers became more selective in which brand they chose to spend their money with – The winning brands were the ones who treated their customers with respect, with great service, and built a relationship with them that still exists today. Who are customer oriented.

And during the same time as the recession, social media exploded onto the scene and mobile became a major part of the customer journey. Customers can now compare products and services in real time and across multiple devices, which has presented a huge challenge for many brands.

Research has found that companies are struggling with this change and are unable to become a customer-centric organization – with the biggest challenge not being able to share customer information across departments.

4 Best Practices to becoming a Customer Centric Company

By being customer centric, you will want to anticipate customers’ needs and delight them with products and services they may not have thought of, but will immediately fall in love with (ie, Apple’s iPhone or iPad). Thus, the customer centric brand creates products, processes, policies and a culture that is designed to support customers with a great experience as they are working towards their goals.

The four best practices that stand out regarding customer-centricity are:

Brands that are committed to customer centricity are passionate, and truly believe the customer comes first. They believe that without the customer, they cannot succeed in business (which is true) and want to see the world through the customer’s eyes. Marketers inside customer-centric organizations understand what customers want, and use customer data to capture customer insights and share this across the organization.

Brands that are committed to customer centricity focus on what the customer wants and needs, and develop products and services around that.

Brands that are committed to customer centricity focus on building relationships designed to maximize the customer’s product and service experience.

Brands that are committed to customer centricity analyze, plan and implement a carefully formulated customer strategy that focuses on creating and keeping profitable and loyal customer.

How to measure the success of a customer centric company?

Not every organization will have the same customer metrics to measure customer centricity. However, the two most important customer centric metrics that should be carefully monitored are churn rate and customer lifetime value.

Churn rate

Acquiring new customers is getting more difficult. Therefore, more companies are investing in keeping existing customers instead of trying to find new ones:

Acquiring new customers can cost up to 5x more than keeping existing customers

A 2% increase in customer retention has the same effect on profits as cutting costs by 10%

On average, companies lose approx. 10% of its customer base each year

Companies with a high retention rate grow faster. The key to success is to understand why people leave, and why people remain customers.

To calculate the churn rate, measure the number of customers who left in the last 12 months divided by the average number of total customers (during the same period).

Customer lifetime value (CLV)

For a customer-centric business, the most valuable asset is the customer. The profits generated during the retention phase are often known as customer lifetime value or CLV. Customer Lifetime Value (CLV) measures the profit your organization makes from any given customer.

To calculate CLV, take the revenue you earn from a customer, subtract the money spent on serving them and adjust all of the payments for time value of money. Another way to calculate it is to take average order value and repeat purchase rates. For example, if your average order value is $100 and the repeat purchase rate per customer is 20% your estimated CLV is $120.

Calculating the customer lifetime value helps you understand why it makes sense to invest in keeping your customers. It’s a great way to get an understanding of your customer portfolio and to segment your customer.

Better Customer Experience

 Treat your customers like they are your boss

Focus on measuring customer satisfaction

 Build customer loyalty to increase customer satisfaction

 Remember special occasions like birthdays

Strive to empower and educate customers

Invest in a self-service support channel

Top level managers must lead from the front with customer service

Talk to your customers, tap into what they want and deliver

Avoid making these customer retention mistakes

Set customer expectations early

You are ignoring customer feedback

You are taking customer feedback to personally

You are using long, boring customer feedback surveys

Learn how to survey your customers the right way

Email is the best channel to increase customer satisfaction

59% of B2B marketers believe email marketing is still the most effective channel in generating revenue.

If it’s so good for marketers, why don’t we use it more to increase customer satisfaction?

That’s a good question, and I want to touch on three quick practical examples of companies who are using email to increase customer satisfaction.

 Tap into social media to track and monitor customer satisfaction so you can keep your customers happy

Increase Customer Satisfaction with Social Media

With your customers now using their mobile phones up to 150 times per day, it’s important to recognize that they will turn to social media to leave their customer complaints.

Your job is to make sure you use social media monitoring tools to keep track of positive and negative feedback, and resolve them accordingly.

In fact, social media provides a great opportunity to actually increase customer satisfaction.

Here’s how you can do just that:

Use social media to monitor brand mentions and sentiment

Use social media as a customer support channel

Use social media to hold Q&A sessions with customers

Increase customer satisfaction by focusing on the customer experience

The customer experience is where business is won and lost. Whether it be through email, social media, customer surveys or good old face to face, as a business in 2014, you need to focus the on customer experience.

Remember, in a reality where your customers pay your paychecks, to increase customer satisfaction – you must treat customers as if they were your boss.