Developing A Customer Centric Brand Culture – We All Have A Tribe

In 2014, a Deloitte and Touche study revealed that businesses with a customer-centric culture are 60% more profitable than their competitors. Those figures should tell how essential a customer is to your business profitability.

What does it mean to be customer-centric?

What are the benefits to this?

How can you build an ideal customer-centric culture and take your brand to the skies?

I will explain all these in this post.

Let’s dive right in.

What’s it?

Dr. Peter Fader the author of Customer Centricity: Focus on The Right Customer For Strategic Advantages in his podcast with Blake Morgan defined a customer-centric culture as aligning the growth of a brand and the delivery of services with current and future needs of segmented customers to maximize their customer lifetime value (CLV).

That means the growth of your brand should wholly be focused on your delivery of services and unique experience that your customers will like and keep coming back.

I’m sure you have seen this happening in some businesses. Businesses in the US lose about $62 billion due to poor customer care. There are small companies that have excellent customer care services. Customers like if you listen to their challenges. You have also read about companies that tumbled down after failing to please their customers.

It all boils down to one thing; the customer is king.    

Benefits of focusing on the customer

There are countless benefits to being a customer-centric brand. But before that, you need to collect the right customer data to create an ideal profile, which will allow you to develop personalized experiences and communications for customers.

After that, here are the benefits to that:     

You can scale faster

You see, once your brand begins to focus on the customer obsessively, it will grow so fast. There is a vast difference between brands with a customer-centric culture and those without. Usually, once you treat one customer right, he will tell 10 of his friends. However, if you treat him wrong, he will tell 15 of his friends; who will tell others and keep the circle going. 

An excellent experience pulls customers to your brand. It will trigger word-of-mouth marketing, which is a much more powerful form of marketing. The result is an increase in customer base and profitability. If your brand is profitable, you can quickly grow and beat your competitors.

Improves customer experience

By focusing on your customers, you will want them to think and talk positively about your brand. By aligning yourself to this line of thinking, you will want to improve the customer experience whenever they interact with your business operational environment; I’m talking about your website, social media pages, and YouTube videos. They should offer solutions to challenges facing the customers.

Be always there for your customers. Don’t keep their messages waiting for almost a week on your Facebook page. You will lose them. Let your website be optimized for great user experience. By taking into consideration the little alterations, you will build a powerful profitable brand.

Boosts customer retention

Do you know how to calculate CLV? It’s the value of a customer at a specific period. Due to our customer-centric culture, some of our clients keep coming back and referring others. We calculate the customer lifetime value by calculating the value from one client against the time we have worked with him.

Forbes reported that it’s five times as hard to acquire new customers as to retain current ones. So, what you need to do as a brand is not only to acquire new customers but also to offer a unique experience to current ones, which ultimately increases their chances of ordering your services regularly.

How to build the culture

Honestly, most companies struggle to develop a customer-centric culture. In fact, only about 14% of marketers subscribe to these thoughts. 

You see, during the economic depression, customers become selective when it comes to purchasing products and services. Brands that had excellent customer care, good customer relationships, and experiences always rose to the top of the file because customers kept coming back.

How can you build a customer-centric brand? Follow these steps:

1.     Collect customer data

You need sufficient customer data if you have to improve their experiences whenever they land on your site or social media. Without data, how will you know what they want? So, begin your research by taking simple surveys, interviewing some of them, and getting their feedback.

Most of these SaaS products allow beta testers to ascertain the level of user experience. That’s an excellent way to collect customer data. You can also ask questions on platforms where your customers hang out. If you are a real estate realtor, why not post a simple question in a realtor’s Facebook group such as, “What challenge are you facing currently in your business?”

Most people want to have their say in a matter. They will want someone to listen to them. So, they will post their challenges. You will then have primary customer data to begin your brand’s customer-centricity.

2.     Segmentation leads to personalized experiences

Not all will have the same experience with your brand. You see, people have varied needs and challenges. Some don’t understand how to acquire leads. Some fail terribly when it comes to consistency and accountability. Some customers need skills on how to strike an effective work-life balance.

Don’t offer all these customers the same solution because they will not stay for long after that. Customize a unique experience to each one of them and fulfill their needs. To do that, you need to segment them.

3.     Exceed their expectation

When a client hires us to advertise for them, they have expectations. Most of the time, they have high expectations based on the results we have had in the past. The aim is to to always exceed the expectations of the client.

After understanding the needs of your customers, craft unique experiences for them, and exceed their expectations. That can differentiate you from your competitors. Offer rare services; there is value in anything rare.

Exceeding customer expectations doesn’t always mean offering discounts on services and goods; you can learn to package your offers excellently, offer free trials, and offering value-packed bonuses.

Whichever the case, learn to exceed their expectations.

Verdict

Any brand that still puts money first at the expense of excellent customer experience will no doubt be pushed to the sidelines in this digital era – where customers have varied options. Countless benefits come as a result of this. To develop a customer-centric brand culture, research on your competitors, segment them, and deliver a unique experience.

You can join the wavemakers. We teach a lot about developing a customer-centric brand and automate processes.

Join the wavemakers program today.