Although customer centric is a very straight forward word and doesn’t need any specific definition to explain the meaning of it , but in real world businesses do make real effort to keep customers first. They make it a priority to provide a great customer experience before and after the sale, to increase profits and gain a competitive edge over their competitors.
But being customer centric is more than just providing customer satisfaction. It’s about keeping the customer at the center of your business and strategizing everything around the sole idea of providing an excellent client support to the customer during and after the sales process.
Integrating your business with a trusted Customer Relationship Management (CRM) like SalesBabu CRM, will help you to provide a 360 degree customer support system to your clients by leveraging all the added advantages of using a versatile cloud based CRM software.
Being a customer centric organization is nothing new, but it has become a more of necessity with online and digital marketing transformation. With increased options in hands, a customer has also become more specific and need the best among the lot, hence today’s business strategy not only need to create better products but also provide exceptional customer satisfaction for increasing their business profit.
Customer centric culture cannot be a product or team based perspective but should be a mindset across the organization. Every department in the company needs to work from a customer centric business strategy rather than a single product or service based perspective, to leverage most from our valuable customers.
What is Customer centric business?
“Customer centricity is an approach to doing business that focuses on providing a positive customer experience in order to drive profit and gain competitive advantage.” – Leslie Cottenje, Hello Customer.
A customer centric business does understand that not every interested person turns out to be a profitable customer. These organizations use CRM analytics to gain a complete view of their customers in order to segregate dead and pursuable customers. Companies majorly focus on the customers who can be loyal to the company and are easy to retain. Thus, companies work towards acquiring and retaining these customers by nurturing their relationships and improving their overall customer satisfaction level.
Challenges for becoming customer centric?
Being a customer centric organization is not as easy and convenient as it always looks like. There are many challenges for being a customer centric company, few of them are as below:
- Businesses are unaware of customer needs
- Unorganised and traditional method of data management.
- Employees and staff members are unaware of customer centric process.
- Inefficient customer care and after sales services.
- Improper data analytics.
Why is customer centric important?
If you have an excellent business products and strategies but a poor customer relationship management then your business won’t be able to make it big. Many surveys suggest that a business can make a profit by just retaining their loyal and old customer. 5% of customer retention can increase a company’s profitability by 95%. Also, it is 6-7 times more expensive to obtain a new customer than it is to retain an existing one.
Market studies reveal that 3 out of 5 customers (59%) would try a new brand or a business venture for a better customer service experience.
Furthermore, 62% of global consumers stop doing business with an organization due to a poor customer satisfaction level. When it comes to sales, the probability of sales with an existing happy customer is up to 14 times more than sales with a new customer.
Hence to make it large in a digital economic market, we need to give more productive customer centric approach to our business to improve overall business turnover.
Methods to become customer centric organization:
1. Understand your customers
Dr. Peter Fader, author of Customer Centricity: Focus on the Right Customers for Strategic Advantage, explains for a profitable business, it’s critical to focus on customer relationships and overall experience. Unfortunately, almost 66% of marketing heads are unaware of their customers worth and by just implementing customer centric marketing policies , companies can significantly increase their profit margin.
With the online shopping market, being customer centrics is a buzzword in today’s economical business strategy. With increasing no. of customers shifting to digital shopping on smartphones and gadgets, it’s very important to understand your customer before offering different business offers and services to the customer.
One of the greatest customer service problems is insufficient knowledge and resources to resolve customer problems. With efficient CRM softwares you can keep a complete view of the contact details, interested product details, background, regional and personal preferences and inclinations. With these added advantages, every detail on the customer is tracked and understood before reaching out to them. Also, the sales and marketing team can create customer centric presentation and campaigns for better customer experience.
2. Streamline Your Business Operations
Efficient business management is required to deliver a positive customer experience. In organizations with unorganized strategies, the potential for providing such excellent customer service is compromised. Conventional business systems mostly lead to the mishandling of customer information and information regarding their preferences, resulting in missed opportunities and business losses.
A reliable CRM software provides a range of attributes to meticulously monitor every factor of customer communication and the sales lifecycle. Such encompasses customer contact details, lists of preferred products, sales stages, follow-up events, further upcoming campaigns, and several types of quotations sent to customers for various products. By adapting a systematic and well-organized procedure for monitoring the client information, the sales and marketing teams can deliver a comprehensive overview to potential leads, providing customer-centric solutions and customizations.
Customized functionalities and user-friendly software interfaces enable customers to connect more efficiently with your business model. Several customers swap to substitute service providers primarily because of complicated software and a deficiency of knowledge base documents and demo videos. Understanding your customer’s preferences and seamlessly implementing them into your software improves the appeal for customers looking for a simple and versatile software and business experience.
Furthermore, introducing a systematic in-house procedure for monitoring and maintaining your service or sales team members to contribute in forming a better and more productive work environment for employees. A content and satisfied employee tends to become a valuable asset for the company’s progress. However, it is necessary to figure out solutions that not only keep customers happy but also organize an employee-friendly business model.
3. Collect data for customer trends
If you are using spreadsheets and documents to track and strategies your customer experience then it’s definitely time for a shift to a cloud based centralised database model. CRM softwares like SalesbabuCRM , provide numerous Management information system(MIS) reports which can be used to collect customer data and strategize your sales and marketing campaigns.
With greater levels of client whereabouts, we can translate it into better customer engagement. Through different social media websites, it is easy to find where your customers are spending time and their preferred products and services. We can integrate various email, SMSs and social media webpages with our CRM to track our customer’s interest and create more customised reports and statistics.
4. Customer centric employees.
If you are not approachable to your customers you can’t provide complete customer satisfaction level to the clients. First steps towards a great customer centric organization is to select and train your employees to become customer centric.
You can’t sell something if you don’t understand the worth of it. Hence, having a customer centric culture is very important to understand the customer’s pain points and relate to it personally. The sales and marketing team should have regular update sessions on customer engagement programs and personal training.
Along with this sales, HR and other marketing teams should work in parallel to have a collaborative effort towards providing effective solutions for customers. A good teamwork projects itself with maximum turnarounds of happy customers.
With various CRM functionalities, we can create many strategic follow up and task management programs which will help to strategies our lead tracking process and maximise our lead conversion rate.
Also, a good CRM software not only provides before sales management, but also provides after sales support of helpdesk services, inventory and ERP management. SalesBabuCRM provides various multi channel support along with sales tracking apps which helps in end-to-end sales management for the company.
5. Open to feedback
“Customer feedback and engagement is more important than ever in the digital age, with a decline in brand loyalty affecting repeat sales. Staying on top of customer preferences and trends can help to combat the degree to which brand loyalty has been fading.” – Mara Canivet.
With the increased usage of digital technology on social media and blogging, every customer can provide his opinionated view as reviews and feedbacks. Numerous people make up their minds on a particular company or product based on reviews and old customers feedback.
Regular surveys are an effective way to understand the pain points of existing customer and give a sense of belongingness to customer and help in retaining more customer. Also, it’s always easier and less expensive to retain existing customers than it is to find new ones.
With constant feedback and survey results, higher authorities can get various metrics to improvise on the company’s pain areas and gain more confidence from the customers.
Take Away:
As we all understand that the easiest way to grow your company is through a customer centric approach for business solutions. Hence to automated and strategies all your business strategies at one place, you need to select a good and trusted CRM software. With CRM solutions like SalesBabuCRM, you can give an end to end support for all customer requirements.
