How to Shift to a Customer-Centric Business?

Anyone who runs a business, whether large or small, knows the importance of customers and their feedbacks. They will be knowing the difficulty involved in shifting to a more customer-centric business. Most of the customers don’t even bother to share their bad experience with the company instead, they take a decision to switch from that company to some other company. That’s a high price to pay for a bad customer experience.

If your brand loses one customer due to a bad service, he might tell it to 10 other people who will divert from your brand. With the growing usage of social media, it is quite natural for any negative feedback to go viral. It can affect the bottom line of your company. As we know mouth publicity is the cheapest and the best advertisement. So making your business more customer-centric is of high priority. Through this article, we will discuss how to shift to a more customer-centric business. For your convenience, the article is divided into three sections: What is a customer-centric organization, the challenges of becoming a customer-centric organization, and how to switch to a more customer-centric business.

What is a customer-centric business?

Customer-centric business is all about doing business in which you serve customers with a positive customer experience both before and after the sale. Thus driving more repeat business, customer loyalty, and profits. There are many customer-centric companies. Amazon is one of the prime examples. They are more happy to fire an employee if they are not suited for their customer-centric culture. However customer-centric strategy cannot be built overnight. You have to plan and execute it properly.

Customer-centric is not just about providing good customer experience, but to provide a great service from the pre-sale stage, purchasing process, and post-sale services. Its strategy is quite simple, put the customers at the core of your business. When you place your customers at the core of your business, you are collecting a wealth of data in your CRM software which can be used to improve your customer experience. Recent studies by Delloite found that companies that are customer-centric were 60% more profitable than others.

Challenges of becoming a customer-centric organization

Creating a customer-centric business depends on each and everyone in the organization. Any bad behavior from anyone in your company can influence the customer experience. Thus building a customer-centric organization is not an easy task. Now let us discuss some of the challenges that most of the executives don’t consider while making efforts to shift to a more customer-centric business.

Losing the momentum

Many organizations make plans to shift to a customer-centric business and they even start executing it. But, after a months time, they lose their momentum and all their efforts and plans are back to zero. There will be initial excitement for everyone to shift to a customer-centric business but this interest is not carry forward later. This may be for many reasons. One of the reason is that the employees don’t get enough support or response from their organizations. The organizations can provide necessary support using tactics like- Boost learning, behavior assessment, knowledge reinforcement, tracking and reporting key metrics, and celebrating success.

Not all managers take it seriously

When the managers don’t follow the new strategies, the employees themselves feel that they don’t have to take it seriously either. The culture change is a top-down approach in which the change starts from the higher officials in an organization. It is important that they learn and apply the new strategies to lead their own employees. After completing the training the managers should mold their behavior as they want to see in others. Only with strong commitment and involvement from the managers, the culture can be changed.

Reverting back to old way because it feels easier

Everyone prefers to stick on to the old way rather implementing the new way even if it is good for customers. Everyone is busy and no one has time to adapt to new culture change. Even the company doesn’t compromise on the employee targets because it’s undergoing a culture change. No matter how efficiently you plan the culture change the practical realities of day-to-day work can quickly revert back all the changes back to zero. Overcoming this requires frequent training to make the belief stronger that the new way is truly better for the organization.

How to switch to a more customer-centric business?

customer-centric business

Since customers are more focussed on the customer service they receive from their company, it is very important to shift to a customer-centric business. There is a high chance the customers divert from your brand if they receive a poor customer experience. If you are neglecting these customer service improvements, it is better to not do business. If you are concerned about your customer service and business, and you are ready to shift to a new culture that can benefit both your company and customers, this article will help you. Here are the few steps to become a more customer-centric business.

Build an understanding of customer behavior

The first and the most important step of being more customer-centric is to build an understanding of customer behavior. The best way to do this is to see yourself as a customer and evaluate how you serve your customers. It is not at all a simple task. You need to send yourselves through the entire customer experience from when the customers first recognize the issue to when the customer gets a solution. When you do this you understand where are your week points, what areas of your service should be improved etc. This can surely help you in improving your service in a more effective way.

Understand your customer’s buying cycle

After building an understanding of customer behavior, the next step is to understand your customer’s buying cycle. This can help you in optimizing the way you communicate with your customers throughout the sales process. There are a few steps that can be followed:

  • Create a customer profile of your typical customers so that you get an insight.
  • Share the customer profile with your team including sales, marketing and account management.
  • Ask help from your customers to figure out the typical customer buying cycle.

Using an effective helpdesk

Once you understand your customer’s buying cycle the next step is to reflect them into a helpdesk like WSDesk. This allows you to manage your customer queries, automation for many tasks, detailed analysis etc. Or if you are the only person to manage your business, WSDesk helps you to effectively keep a track on your support system without missing any customer issues. You also get options to set autosuggestions, automatic satisfaction survey links etc. The better part is that you get many good features even in the free version. And the paid version gives you more features at a decent pricing. By using an effective helpdesk, you can improve the quality of service you provide to your customers. Thus keeping your promise and commitment to your customers. This can help you in building a long-term relationship with the customers.

Encashing Moment Of Truth

Once you understand the customer buying cycle and adopts an effective helpdesk, the next step to becoming a more customer-centric business is to improve each point of your customer experience. The Moment of Truth can be an important decision making factor in the sales process. If you build a more sweet relation rather than just a relation it can make a huge difference in the customer experience.

Scenario

Let us consider a scenario. We all will buy a house at some point in our life. Suppose you are taking a bank loan for buying your new home. At this point, you are having a mixed emotion. You are happy because you get a new home but sad as you have taken a loan and you have to repay it.

In this situation, if the bank gives you a surprise gift when you shift to a new home, your relationship with the bank will be more strong. These are the situations where the relationship with the customer matters. The company’s job is not done until your customer is happy even though you provide him with some service.

Provide the sales with information, content, and tools

This step helps in making yourself useful to your customers at times when they might not have thought to ask for your help. For this, you have to understand the customer needs, provide services at little cost, make your customers feel valued, and build trust. Once the need of the customers is understood, the marketing team will be able to market the products in the right way. This can also help you in improving the customer experience.

Benefits of customer-centric business

customer-centric business

There are many benefits of shifting to a customer-centric business. Let’s sum it up into 10 points:

  1. BUILDS TRUST, CREDIBILITY, AND SOLID REPUTATION
  2. INCREASES WORD-OF-MOUTH REFERRALS
  3. GIVES YOUR BUSINESS A COMPETITIVE ADVANTAGE
  4. REDUCES EMPLOYEE STRESS AND FRICTION
  5. REDUCES CUSTOMER ATTRITION
  6. SAVES MONEY
  7. INCREASES CUSTOMER RETENTION AND LOYALTY
  8. REDUCES RISK AND IMPROVES SUSTAINABILITY
  9. LEADS TO GROWTH
  10. INCREASES REVENUE AND PROFITS!

Concluding notes

Business to business customers is now highly focussed on relationships and business outcomes than solely depending on products and services. So shifting yourself to a more customer-centric business will be an advantage over your key competitors. As we discussed before it is not that easy and it will not happen overnight.

The shift towards customer-centric business is both complex and long. The efforts made for this shift should not be left in between. This shift can have a significant benefit for both your employee and your customer. Hope this article was helpful.

 


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