How To Build A Customer-Centric Strategy For Your Business

Everywhere you go today, you will hear the word ‘Customer Centricity’ echoing in the business industry. Entrepreneurs are ditching traditional sales-driven strategies and embracing the customer-centric approach. A lot of organizations claim to be customer-centric, but what does it really mean? You have heard about a promising new strategy called ‘Customer Centricity,’ but how can your company really become customer-centric?

Customer centricity is a strategy for building customer satisfaction and loyalty by fostering a positive customer experience at every stage of their journey in order to drive profit and maximize long-term financial value to the firm. It is not about ‘what you do’; it is actually about ‘how you do.’ You can’t just put a large poster stating, “We are now Client-Centric!” on the cafeteria wall of your office for all the employees. Well, it’s not that simple. There’s a lot of challenges in actually bringing this definition and mindset to life.

Importance Of Customer Obsession

Serving your customers is the essence of your business, and without it, you can’t possibly thrive. In this digital era, customer expectations have drastically changed, and now more than ever, companies are expected to satisfy their customers at every interaction in exchange for customer loyalty. By the power of social media and word of mouth, they might reach out and bring new people into the franchise through credible and independent recommendations and referrals.

The traditional product-driven mindset of companies focussed only on what they sell and not on what the customer needs, and they eventually had to spend more on customer acquisition than customer retention. Customer satisfaction is at the heart of what drives growth. It is the deciding factor that determines whether your customer intends to buy your products, and will he come back to buy them again.

Implementing A Customer-Centric Approach

It’s too vague to start off by saying, ‘I want to have a customer-centric approach.’ Instead, as a first step to transforming your business, you need to figure out if your company is truly customer-centric by asking yourself a few questions to introspect your business ideology:

• Are your customers’ requirements engraved in the company’s DNA and communicated to all your employees?

• Is the customer experience a primary focus for your sales reps?

• Are you fully meeting your customer’s expectations, and are their issues being attended timely?

• Have you optimized your resources to ensure optimal engagement levels for each customer?

After analyzing your current situation, how can your business move from where you are to becoming more customer-centric? You need to bridge the customer value gap by delivering customer-centric value offerings. Instead of obsessing over your product, if you can figure out who your best customers are, and if you can find a way to build your business around them, you can potentially make more money. In order to migrate your business to a customer-centric approach:

• Create an extensive record of your customer’s requirements by analyzing their feedback to get a more in-depth insight into the varying needs of different groups of customers.

• Track your customers’ journey to discover what persuades them to adopt your services or to drop them. Gather as much voice of the customer as possible to find what they feel is essential.

• Ensure all your employees have got clarity on whom they’re targeting and then how they go about it.

• Do a detailed mapping of your customer journey to understand where the tension points are and then rigorously work on where you’re falling short.

Leveraging Customer Centricity With CRM Software

A lot of companies using CRM software are so engrossed in devising sales and marketing strategies that they are unable to use CRM to its full potential. And consequently, all their leads slip through the cracks, and their customers move on. To identify opportunities and drive optimal results, you need to bridge the gap between strategy and vision by developing your CRM application having customer centricity at its core.

Your business won’t thrive with an outdated CRM application. For developing long term relationships and retaining profitable customers, you need to give them a seamless and tailored experience, but is your current system enough for that?

Apptivo has unlocked a new horizon for customer-centricity. Using Apptivo’s CRM application, you can visualize the entire sales environment, which helps you deeply understand customer behavior. We believe that each and every customer of yours is unique, and their feedback is equally valuable for your organization. Apptivo enables your sales team to be able to engage customers in a more personalized way. Apptivo’s helpdesk reduces the effort that is required by the sales reps to satisfy each customer.

Final Thoughts

We are talking about transforming your entire organization to focus on your clients, there will be hurdles and obstructions, but your ability to push through them will be the key to the success of your customer-centric approach. It requires you to be willing to change your entire organizational structure and metrics to align your products and services around the requirements of your customers. Combining Apptivo’s CRM application with your organization and focussing on a customer-centric approach will help you enhance profitability and develop a long-term relationship with happy and satisfied customers.