To create a successful business in today’s world, several factors play a crucial role. One of these important factors is the customers. Customer engagement is critical for business growth. With the customer-centric business model gaining worldwide popularity, businesses should adopt a customer-centered approach to build a successful venture.
Understanding the customer’s expectations and demands, providing a solution to overcome their challenges, gathering feedback and incorporating those changes – all of these contribute to a great customer experience.
The CX management market is expected to grow by 15.3% every year from 2022 to 2030. No wonder, businesses are heavily investing in all the modern CX technologies coming up to deliver the best customer experience possible.
For example, to ensure a seamless product walkthrough, companies are leveraging digital adoption platforms. This allows them to guide customers through essential tasks.
Similarly, behavioral analytics tools such as Google analytics for eCommerce are being used to better understand customer behavior and make accurate predictions about their future actions. Such insights can help businesses make informed and customer-centric decisions.
In this article, we’ll discuss how adopting a customer-centric approach allows businesses to achieve profits and high ROI.
5 Ways How Customer-Centric Approach Can Help Businesses
Every company wishes to enhance customer experiences across all touchpoints. Whether it is increasing sales conversions or fostering loyal customer relationships, a customer-centric approach has always helped businesses connect with customers on a personal level.
Here’s how a customer-centric approach can help businesses achieve their goals.
1. Boosts CX
A customer-centric approach provides businesses with in-depth information about the customers, their industry, and a snapshot of their journey with your company. This information acts as a foundation for crafting a long-term strategy for attracting and retaining customers.
An intelligent CRM like HubSpot or Zoho provides the customer information in a structured format giving the teams a bird’s eye view of customer data. This information can be leveraged to design personalized experiences for the customers.
For example, the customer’s purchase history can be used to generate personalized product recommendations.
Here is a screenshot of the product recommendations shown by Amazon.
Here are a few tips on how to improve customer experience.
- Leverage AI and machine learning to create breakthrough customer experiences. Use chatbots like botsify to resolve customers’ queries 24*7. Provide real-time order updates via these chatbots and enhance the customer experience.
- Embrace omnichannel marketing strategy to deliver consistent experiences to the customers on online and offline channels.
- Design your website to serve dynamic content based on customers’ preferences.
- Use geolocation to share recommendations based on the locations.
For example, TripAdvisor, an online hotel booking and travel website uses the customer’s location and browsing history to send hotel recommendations.
Improving the user experience of the website or product is another factor that contributes to improving the customer experience. The design should be such that the customers find the desired information about the company, products, and services without any hassles.
It should be easy to use and be optimized for mobile devices to make the customer journey as seamless as possible.
2. Ensures Great Customer Engagement and Retention
Building strong relationships with customers ensures they are happy and engaged with your brand. Businesses today are focused on designing a customer engagement strategy that creates emotional relationships with customers. Remember connecting with customers on a personal level makes them feel valued and boosts their loyalty. You may always look at good examples of customer engagement to get ideas if you’re not sure how to interact with customers more. It all comes down to figuring out what works for your customers, and tried-and-true methods could be a great helping hand.
The customer-centric approach helps businesses craft an engagement strategy that focuses on improving customer satisfaction. By giving them visibility into the individual customer journey, this approach ensures the team connects with the customers at the right time with the right message.
Communicate with the customers in every possible way. Leverage platforms, such as live chat and chatbots, emails, text messaging, phone calls, and more to provide them with the information they are looking for. Invest in mediums that provide you insights into customers’ thoughts and challenges. Additionally, you can utilize customer feedback analytics to gain valuable insights into customers’ preferences and challenges to enhance your products and services based on their needs.
Capturing customer feedback is a powerful method for gathering customer insights. Create feedback questionnaires to ask customers about the product or service performance and utilize these insights into delivering a better product or service.
Here is an example of a customer survey shared by Hotjar. This survey is sent to customers who have downgraded their subscriptions.
Similarly, conduct customer sentiment surveys to capture different emotions the customers experience while exploring the products. Use ‘like or dislike’ buttons, emoticons, star ratings, or number ratings to collect feedback.
Take a look at this by email screenshot shared HubSpot to its new users. Notice how HubSpot is trying to capture customers’ feedback about their onboarding experience.
3. Boosts Revenue
The customer-centric business approach ensures increased revenue because of enhanced customer satisfaction and retention. It encourages customers to speak about your company and its products or services.
According to ReferralCandy, 83% of satisfied customers refer products and services to their families and friends.
Here are a few ways how customers help in advertising your offerings and boosting sales.
- Build an online forum where customers can connect and share their experiences with the products.
Sephora has a forum for beauty enthusiasts named Beauty Talk that encourages them to share tips, discuss ideas, ask beauty-related queries, and a lot more. This is an excellent effort to keep customers engaged with the brand. This online community has over 5M members around the world.
- Encourage the customers to leave a review or share a testimonial about the products and help you strengthen the brand image.
- Devise a referral incentive program to motivate existing customers to recommend new customers.
Use referral software like Referral Factory or InviteReferrals to set up an exclusive referral program for the customers. These software solutions also help you share incentives with customers without any hassles. Further, you can also track the performance of the program via intelligent reports.
- Offer discounts, limited-time deals, exclusive access to premium features, and other benefits to the customers to boost sales.
The customer-centric approach helps you build a strong reputation as a brand in the eyes of your customers, thereby offering you multiple avenues for growth and profits.
4. Aligns the Teams to Organization Goals
The customer-centered approach provides an end-to-end holistic understanding of the customer journey to the customer success, sales, and marketing teams. Leverage the customer data across all these customer-facing functions to create excellent experiences.
Let us understand how a customer-centered approach brings each of these teams to work together to provide meaningful experiences to the customers.
Being responsible for attracting new customers and retaining existing ones, the marketing team plays a crucial role in lead generation and customer retention. Reaching out to the desired target audience via data-driven marketing campaigns helps them serve personalized content that audiences can relate to. Hence, understanding customer behavior across the various digital channels is important for marketing teams.
Similarly, the sales team must have access to the customers’ journey and their interactions with the product. Selling the right product to the right customer at the right time is essential. The complete customer information will empower the sales team to identify the best sales opportunities that would certainly lead to conversions.
The customer success team is responsible for helping the customers use the company’s products or services proactively. From engaging the trial users, and responding to their queries to helping them with renewals, the customer success team boosts the customer lifetime value and contributes to reducing churn.
By giving them access to vital customers’ information, you are allowing your team to step into the customers’ shoes and help them resolve their pain points. They can cater to customer needs proactively and increase customer satisfaction.
5. Reduces Costs
The implementation of a customer-centric approach presents businesses with opportunities for increased sales, revenue, and growth.
- The sales and customer support teams connect with customers at the right time, helping them make better decisions.
For example, the team can connect with customers who are completing their trial and offer them the required guidance for subscribing to a premium plan.
- By putting the customers at the center, businesses can connect with customers on a personal level. It will foster customer loyalty and reduce the churn rate.
- Satisfied customers are the best advocates for the brand. Being brand loyalists, these customers will help you with referrals, thereby reducing customer acquisition costs.
- As the entire team works toward a common goal, there will not be any friction between the team members in understanding the assigned tasks, tracking the updates, and more.
- The customer-centric approach brings about stability in the work processes with defined workflows, thereby improving operational efficiency.
Summing Up
Implementing a customer-centric approach is beneficial for the customers, the team, and your company. It provides businesses an edge in this competitive market in terms of providing quality customer service while delivering excellent products or services. It helps businesses achieve their goals and generate excellent revenue and profits.
We hope this article has helped you understand the benefits a customer-centric approach can offer to your business.
