Building a Business That Truly Does Put Its Customers First
Customers should be at the center of every business, but do businesses actually make an effort to ensure this? While every business relies on customers to make it a success, not every business focuses on its customers to the same extent. Some will seemingly treat customers as an afterthought, selling them goods or services, but failing to focus on the customer experience or customer journey.
As a result, customers may continue to use businesses due to convenience, but they are unlikely to form an emotional attachment to that brand. On the other hand, other businesses will do their utmost to build customer loyalty and make customers feel valued and supported through their interactions. Guess which is the better approach?
In an ever-more competitive business environment, businesses should do their utmost to adopt the second of these two strategies. Doing so will inspire confidence on the part of the customer, while also providing assistance for businesses when it comes to honing their offerings.
But how do you build a business that puts its customers first? From good training of employees to measures like implementing Customer Effort Scores (CES), here are four suggestions you just might want to consider:
#1. Make yourself available
A store that doesn’t have anyone taking money behind the counter is giving up sales. But being present and available to customers isn’t only about the actual point of purchase. Customers want to be able to interact with businesses or their employees when necessary — both in the case of physical, brick-and-mortar businesses and digital businesses as well.
Companies should familiarize themselves with the various ways customers want to communicate with them (for example, a digital business must stay in tune with new social media platforms) and provide the necessary support on these platforms. That means publicizing the different channels and then responding quickly to queries. Businesses should want to engage their customers — and showing that engagement at every stage of the customer journey is a reassuring note of commitment to customers.
#2. Train your team
Business owners may know everything about their company, but they probably won’t be the first person a customer or potential customer interacts with. Training your team to be able to answer common questions, while empowering them to solve problems, will result in a more professional, streamlined customer interaction with your business.
It’s not only about knowing pricing or product details, either: Customer service means being helpful, showing empathy, and other traits you would like to be associated with your brand identity. Building a customer-centric culture means every person at every level understanding the kind of ethos you wish your business to epitomize. Proper training is essential to achieve this.
#3. Implement customer feedback opportunities
Customer feedback is invaluable. By virtue of being a customer or would-be customer, an individual shows that they are part of the audience for your business or brand. At the same time, they are unlikely to sugarcoat feedback. This feedback can then be used to improve your business. In the case of good feedback, it can highlight what you’ve done well and serve as a motivator. In the case of negative feedback, it offers guidance on mistakes that you’ve made, which you can then work to rectify — both for that specific customer, and others going forward.
Consider implementing measures like Customer Effort Score (CES), a metric for measuring customers’ experience with a service or product, ranked on a seven-point scale. Gathering this data helps businesses, since it may raise awareness of certain pain points they were not aware of on the customer journey. It also makes customers aware that you care, which can help further drive loyalty. Customers like to do business with organizations they find enjoyable and easy to work with. So make sure you listen — and react accordingly.
#4. Reward your customers
Customers are rarely going to have “skin in the game” when it comes to how well your business does. Emotional attachments with a brand are hard to achieve, and usually take many years. Unless they’re shareholders in your business, customers are also unlikely to care about your latest quarterly earnings and whatever growth your business is achieving — even if they’ve played a role in ensuring that success.
There are no shortcuts when it comes to driving customer loyalty to a brand: You need to prove that you’re a business worth getting passionate about, and to continue living up to high expectations for a long period of time. But you can make sure that you reward loyal customers. Seeking feedback is important, although this on its own helps businesses a lot more than it aids customers. Businesses wanting to bring customers along with their success should also make sure to give tangible benefits back to the customer — including loyalty programs and other benefits.
This, in turn, will help to increase brand loyalty and may inspire good word of mouth and continued usage. Since customers who trust companies more will spend more (think about upselling, or example), this is a win-win for all involved.
