Customers are in charge of your destiny. Without them, you can’t make any sales. It is their needs and intentions that boost your sales.

A customer-focused business strategy helps you keep the customers’ needs and preferences on the top of your priority list. Here is a short story about why it’s so important.

“Over the last few decades, people of the world communities are relentlessly trying hard to get rid of plastic garbage around. The Adidas Company took it as an opportunity. They started producing sportswear shoes with fiber recycled from ocean trash.

This innovative effort gained a big exposure that they sold over 1 million pairs of shoes in one year. Seriousness to customer feedback was the key element behind this success story.“

It may take months to create loyal customers but seconds to lose them. Despite having good products, you may collapse if you lack good strategies. This article will guide you on how to grow a customer-focused business strategy and save your entrepreneurial future.

What is Customer Focused Business Strategy?

In a customer-focused business strategy, customers are at the heart of all decision-making. Its end result is trust and loyalty. It starts with identifying the needs and wants of the customers.

Accordingly, they modify their proceedings and add uniqueness to their products/services. Thus, it creates an ‘X-factor’ for their products, making them different in this heavily competitive market.

Benefits of Customer Focused Business Strategy

Whenever consumers are asked what impacts their level of trust with a company, most of them reply customer services rank number one.

Dimensional Research

There are some specific reasons why customer focused business strategies are so important today. For example:

• It helps you understand the customers’ likes, dislikes, demands, and affordability. 
• Following the market trends and changes in customer behavior, you can update all your strategies.
• Satisfied customers love to refer their favorite brands to friends, families, and close relatives. It works as word-of-mouth marketing.
• It can help you figure out new ways to develop an emotional bonding with the customers.
• You can accurately predict the market demand, which results in less quantity of closing stock products.

Thus, customer focused business strategy plays a significant impact on the bottom line of a business.

Tips to Develop a Successful Customer Focused Business Strategy

Customers’ behavior has been changing faster than ever before. They love to shop from the brands that give them a fast, easy, and personalized experience. Most business organizations today develop all their products and strategies based on customers’ needs and wants.

Globally, 96% of consumers say that customer service is an influential factor in building brand loyalty.

Microsoft

Here, we’ll provide you with some effective tips by which you can improve your customer focused business strategies. Keep reading.

Uphold Team Collaboration

Without team collaboration, it’s impossible to ensure better customer support and productivity in the workplace. Customer support not just means providing answers to some queries. In fact, it is the voice and face of an organization.

70% of consumers love to support a company that delivers great customer services.

Market Insider

When multiple teams synchronize with each other, it becomes easier for them to identify gaps and bring quick solutions to the customers. For example,

• Whenever a customer show interest in a new product, sales and marketers can improve their knowledge base by sharing more personalized information.
• In case of technical questions, support and engineering teams can join the conversation to convince the customers.

But remember, don’t make your collaboration process so complicated or bureaucratic that it disturbs your productivity. You can only reap more leads, increased sales, an extended customer base, and loyalties.

Make Your Customer Feel Important

Customers can quickly go south once they feel their problems and queries are not being heard.

Brummel

Would you ever love to reintroduce your problem each time you interact with the customer care unit of the same brand? Obviously not. This experience will strike in your mind that you have been repeatedly ignored. This attitude can severely downsize the brand value of an organization. 

Behind every customer, there is a story. So, you must keep a log of each of their stories. How would you do that? Keep the following points in your customer support logbook.

• User name.
• Phone and email.
• Token/serial number of their case.
• A short synopsis of their problem.
• The latest status of their story.
• Who is in charge of the case?
• When they last reached out to you.

By doing so, you can quickly retrieve any registered customer’s information in a minute. Thus, you can build a personalized relationship with your customers.

Meet Your Customers Where They Are

At a time, it was easy to reach potential customers through newspapers and magazines. Then came radio and television. But now, it’s super complex. Because today there are countless platforms where customers are scattered in different ways.

Remember, customers, don’t need to find you. It’s you who need them. So, if you still stick to only a single platform, it will be a terrible mistake in this 21st century. You need a 360-degree eye lens to keep them all under your coverage. 

Today, most audiences are active on mobile-centric digital platforms (Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, YouTube, etc). First, segment the market through demographics since the result will be eye-opening.

Then, you’ll find it is super easy to track your target audiences. Besides, this can help you grow your business faster than the traditional approaches.

Use Feedback to Leverage Your Business

Many entrepreneurs are scared of customer feedback. So they try to avoid being involved with it. But doing so is undoubtedly a wrong move.

Brands that proactively invite and accept customer feedback are favoured by 77% of consumers.

Microsoft

Their complaints and recommendations can help you discover new ways to offer better customer experiences. So, instead of ignoring it, allow your customers to share their feedback with you.

Today, social proof is a powerful way to create credibility online for any eCommerce website. Customer feedback is the only way you can harness social proof’s power. Alongside, it enables to build of a healthy relationship between customers and organizations.

Prioritize Customer Retention

According to Harvard Business Review, an increase in customer retention by 5% can increase your profit by 25% to 95%. It is easier to sell products to existing customers rather than to the news. Because you have to burn money to acquire new audiences.

So, isn’t it better to prioritize your existing customers? Repeat purchase rate, churn rate, active users, etc., are some useful metrics to evaluate customer retention rate. With the following tips, you can even boost your customer retention rate.

• Give them a sudden discount on sales
• Be connected with them through follow-up emails.
• Vale their feedback and solve their problems immediately
• Build trust and confidence through quick communication
• Use automation to re-engage customers
• Measure customer lifetime value

Prioritizing customers is the first step to creating a loyal group of audiences. By doing so, you can scale up the brand value of your business.

Sell Based on Value, Not Products or Prices

Most conventional traders focus a lot on their production costs to set the pricing model of their products. But they don’t know the real value of their products in the market. If your product is overpriced, customers will avoid you.

Again, if it is lower-priced, it will harm the market ecosystem and your business. Therefore, value-driven marketing can generate a solid customer base for your business. So, how to do this value-driven marketing?

• First, identify the pain points and demands of the customers
• Assess if your products really meet the pain points and the market demand
• If so, then design ad copy how your products can solve the pain points

So, if you wish to establish a sustainable business model, keep focusing on the product’s value, not prices.

Evaluate Customer Lifetime Value

Not all your customers are equally important. Because everybody won’t purchase your products recurringly. Besides, there are some products that people buy seasonally. Customer lifetime value (CLV) is a great tool you can use here.

Using this tool, you can profoundly identify your potential recurring customers. Accordingly, you can effectively distribute your marketing budget to reap benefits from both ends. It will bring a balance between your long and short-term marketing plans.

Be Transparent in Information

Customers want fast delivery. But many traders deceive customers by promising to make a quick delivery. End of the day, they are all identified as scammers. Due to long-distance and costly logistics, it might be impossible for you to offer quick delivery.

But don’t worry, many customers are ready to compromise with long delivery time for low prices and product quality. So, better for you to find out those sets of customers rather than deceiving the entire population.

You must clarify everything in the product descriptions and shipping section. It will help you get the customers who match your proposals.

Examples of Customer Focused Business Strategy

If you’re still wondering why the customer focused business strategy is so important. Here are some examples. Keep reading.

Tommee Tippee Cups

Tommee Tippee was a small and medium-sized company producing sippy cups for kids and babies. Once they came across a hashtag on social media #cupsforBen. 

The story is about a father of an autistic kid who is asking for the replacement of a limited edition of Tommee Tippee cups. His kid won’t drink from other sippy cups. By the hashtag, he was trying to grab the company’s attention.

Soon the hashtag went viral. Tommee Tippee took it seriously and declared to produce a certain number of sippy cups, especially for Ben. This entire story brought them tremendous recognition. So, never ignore or be shy of social media feedback. Rather take them as opportunities.

McDonald’s

In the early 2010s, McDonald’s experienced a hitch in sales. To turn things around, they emphasized their focus on customer experience. They started researching how to improve order accuracy, simple menu cards, and interior design to lessen waiting time for order processing. 

Also, they included some new menus that are helpful for the dietary customers. After all the modifications, their sales growth went up by 4.1%. So, always find new ways to give new tastes to your customers.

AirBnB

AirBnB is a prime example to set personalized customer experience. It has two different types of customers: one who rents out its spaces and the other looking for spaces to stay.

AirBnB has designed a simple interface where users can easily find out their ways to be hosts or book rooms for staying. This simple feature is the reason that helped AirBnB achieve massive growth in the market within the next following years.

Casper

Casper sells sleep products online. It provides home delivery services to different parts of the USA. Alongside regular business, they observed many people suffering from insomnia. So, they launched a free chatbot names ‘Insomnobot3000’.

This chatbot provided them with real-time funny conversations till they fell asleep. It gave their audiences a little peace of mind. But through the chatbot, Casper collected tons of phone numbers and customer information. 

Then, they ran multiple promotional campaigns using the information. It pulled them around $100 million in sales in the first year of the chatbot launch. So, identify your customers’ problems and find a solution.

Final Thoughts

In college and university life, we often hear ‘customer is always right’. But stepping into the real world, you’ll realize it isn’t entirely true. Even customers make a lot of mistakes for which you aren’t responsible. Once someone experiences this harsh reality, what happens next?

Most entrepreneurs start ignoring the customers’ complaints. And this is the point from where most entrepreneurs last lose solidity on the market. So, whatever the situation, you cannot move customers from the center of your business strategies.