Given the choices that customers have in the SaaS industry today, customer focus has become indispensable for companies. Gone are the days when you could anticipate customer needs and produce your offerings accordingly to succeed in the market. Now, you need to strategize more precisely for your products to fit the right market.

Customer focus can be a competitive advantage if you are able to adopt it. It’s less of a process and more of a culture that needs to be adopted into your organization so that all departments perform accordingly.

So how does customer focus impact your business? What strategies must you adopt to build this culture? How does it drive business growth? These are a few areas we will discuss in this blog. But first, let’s start with the definition of customer focus.

What is Customer Focus?

An approach called “customer focus” centers business decisions around customers’ needs. Businesses prioritize serving their customers instead of maximizing profits based on how those choices affect customers. This long-term approach fosters trust and loyalty and can generate more revenue.

It’s a mindset, philosophy, or a strategy to align your business processes with customer’s goals and expectations. When you implement this strategy in your company, all your business departments work towards the same goal – customer success. Since your success is dependent on the success of your customers, it’s a winning combination.

Objective Shift after Implementing Customer Focus

Before:

Employee -> keep your boss happy
Employer -> maximize profit
Customer-> maximize ROI

As we can see, there is a Scattered collective vision.

After:

Employee -> help customers maximize ROI
Employer -> help customers maximize ROI
Customer -> maximize ROI

Here we can see a Unified collective vision.

When all your departments start working towards one goal, you become a powerful force achieving better results.

Why is Customer Focus Important?

The obvious benefit of a customer focus approach is greater customer satisfaction. But how it enhances your business growth is what we are going to explore below.

Greater Retention

Customer retention is one of the primary goals of any SaaS organization. When you want to retain your customers for the long run, it requires you to know your customers’ current and future needs and goals and the role your product plays in achieving that. Getting this insight requires you to focus on those needs and goals and work closely with them, typically with your customer success department. The more you focus on getting to know your customers, the longer they’ll stick around.

More Revenue

In the initial stage of implementation of this strategy, you would experiment to find out what works best. This means spending more time, resources and money. But after a certain point, you develop a knack that starts giving you better outcomes.

Your operational costs tend to decrease as you get more specialized in serving your customers. This starts generating more revenue for your business for two reasons:

• It is 5x cheaper to retain an existing customer than to acquire a new one.
• Existing customers can start generating more business through upgrades.

Brand Advocacy

When customer loyalty is leveraged, brand advocacy can be obtained. Loyal and satisfied customers tend to share their positive experiences with your brand with others. This brings more publicity through word-of-mouth marketing which is usually more effective than advertising.

How to Build a Customer-Focused Culture?

There are many ways you can build this culture in your organization. Some are generic, while others are more contextual, which only you can find. Read on to explore the 10 different ways you can choose from to build a customer-focused culture.

Hire the Right Candidates

Building a customer-focused culture should start with hiring the right people. During your hiring process, gauge the candidate’s customer mindset towards keeping customers at the center of your business.

Exposure to Customers

To build a customer focus strategy, it’s not just the customer facing employees who must care about your customers. Even the employees who don’t regularly interact with your customers should understand the importance of putting customers first. his will infuse the customer-centric culture at all levels.

Connect Employee’s Growth to Customer Outcomes

When a manager can measure the impact they are creating in customer outcomes, they get more motivated towards serving them. Employees’ growth should be linked to customer outcomes and proper appraisals should happen based on that. For example, sales teams should be incentivized for selecting the right-fit customer that enables longer customer retention.

Build a Great Employee Culture

Employee culture is infectious when it comes to dealing with customers. When your employees have a high satisfaction level and feel good about their job, they can be easily motivated towards creating a greater customer experience. Customers can also feel the positive impact while interacting with highly motivated employees.

Share Customer Insights Company-Wide

Customer insights are essential to gain a deeper understanding of your customer’s needs, challenges, and outcomes. While this may sound relevant only for marketing and sales teams, it would be wise to share it across all teams. This way, everyone can access the customer insights and optimize their work according to customer needs.

Build Customer Empathy

Customer empathy is easier said than done in many SaaS organizations. It’s important in building a greater understanding of customer pain-points and emotional needs. There cannot be a greater attribute than empathy that helps cement your relationship with customers.

Employees of a customer focus organization should do a deeper study of customers on different channels like social media, support calls, etc., to better understand them. Through this, they should be able to identify what really clicks with customers.

Use Customer Metrics

Customer satisfaction and loyalty can easily be mistaken if not analyzed with the right metrics. Make sure you use the right metrics to measure your customer’s health and share it across all teams.

A customer health score through a customer success platform can help you give an overall picture of the health of a customer account. Another key metric is a Net Promoter Score (NPS) that tells you the satisfaction level of your customers with your brand. Likewise, there are many metrics that can help you assess the customer’s sentiments and take proper actions towards improving them.

Provide Feedback to Employees

Customer focus can be improved when the customer success culture fosters employees. Think of it like a chain reaction. Employees need to be customer-focused and have a customer-focused strategy. You need to use employee rewards software to reward employees who are helping customers in the right direction. To improve customer focus, you need to provide feedback to employees. This will help the employees know what they need to do to focus on the customer. Customer-focused employees are the biggest asset for any company. Give feedback regularly instead of waiting for an annual session.

Your employees need to imbibe customer-focused strategies to spell out the mission, vision, and interests of the company. A key aspect to consider is noticing if employees are working on their feedback. What is the review status? Is there any improvement from the last quarter? Are the employees who are offering excellent customer service being rewarded?

Leverage the Power of Data

Data is everything in today’s day and age. To unlock the true potential of data, you need to use technologies such as the internet of things and artificial intelligence. These twin technologies can enhance customer focus. A customer-focused strategy can be improved if adequate attention is paid to data technology and intelligence.

Data can help you derive predictive insights. This can help you improve customer focus in the long run. You can enhance relationships, create surveys, and boost response rates with data analytics. Data is all set to be the engine to putting and keeping customers first and improving ROI.

You can even take the help of an expert such as the Chief Customer Officer to ensure customer focus in the organization.

Keep Investing in Learning

A customer-focused culture and customer-focused strategy requires a strong foundation. It won’t happen overnight. Customer focus can be improved if the foundation is strong. You can build a customer-focused strategy brick by brick if it’s solid. You need to implement certain strategies to succeed on this journey of improving customer focus. Improving technical skills will encourage employees to perform better at every opportunity. Customer focus improves company growth, increases loyalty, and ensures customer satisfaction. If you keep investing in learning and education, you’re improving the outcome. You can take the help of courses from reputed institutes to instill innovative ideas in employees and get their feedback. This will help you develop customer focus skills and create customer-focused interactions. Learning will help offer an advantage over competitors and predict insights to face disruption.

Frequently Asked Questions

Q 1: What makes customer focus critical for business?

A 1: Here are some of the reasons that make customer focus critical for business success:

• Results in better retention
• Leads to more revenue
• Encourages brand advocacy

Q 2: What is the right way to build a customer-focused culture?

A 2: Here are some of the right ways to build a culture-focused culture:

• Hire the right candidates
• Exposure to customers
• Connect employee’s growth to customer outcomes
• Build a great employee culture
• Share customer insights company-wide
• Build customer empathy
• Use customer metrics
• Provide feedback to employees
• Leverage the power of data
• Keep investing in learning

Q 3: What are some of the best examples of customer focus?

A 3: Good customer service, hearing (and acting upon) customer feedback, and creating individualized customer experiences are a few examples of customer focus.

Q 4: Define the customer-focused mindset.

A 4: An understanding of the motivation behind a relentless effort to deliver an amazing customer experience, as well as all the necessary how-to training and positive attitudes, are all components of a customer-focus mindset.

Wrapping up

With the rising need to provide a greater customer experience, companies are evolving from sales-driven or product-focused cultures to a customer-focused culture. It has become increasingly important to give better service to customers. As a result, the onus has expanded from just professionals with customer-facing roles to the whole organization.

Every team in an organization has something to learn from customer experience that can be integrated into their functions. Even the products must be designed to keep the core user’s needs in focus rather than the product owner’s intuitions. Instilling customer focus values throughout your organization takes time but, once done, it prevails forever.

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