I have to please my customers?! The importance of customer centricity

How do you differentiate your company’s product or solution from others at a time more crowded with advertising, slogans, social media noise than ever before?

The growing response to this is for businesses to follow a path of ‘customer centricity’, a term many take to equate to customer service.

But customer centricity is far more than just good service or support.

It’s about creating a culture built and designed around the customer. It’s about performing product development and creating products, tailored to your customer base.

For product development teams, it should be about creating products that solve customer needs, or issues that will become headaches if not addressed.

This allows sales and marketing teams to create a narrative or a story around solving the solution:

• What’s the context the product is used in?
• What does it give the user/customer?
• Does it save them time? Marketing campaigns can talk of increased efficiency, and how employees can claim back evenings and weekends with family and friends.
• Does it save them money? Then, marketers can talk of the savings and how else that saved money could be better spent. It could be the difference between profit and loss. For a start-up, the difference between failure and success.

The ‘old’ ways of creating a product and then finding a market and demand for it are over.

Take GDPR for example

No company created a GDPR-compliant solution for marketing or salespeople and then hoped that some future regulation would come into effect and stimulate demand for it.

But instead, recognising that GDPR was something likely to cause an issue or make life harder for their customers – some companies ensured that any products in their development pipeline were compliant with the new regulation. Graydon did too, with our new Graydon Market Information tool.

What’s in it for you?

Well, we’ve mentioned what you need to do above, but what will it do for you or for your business?

More revenue!

Customers like to feel valued – loyal customers are worth up to 10x as much as their original, first purchase

Retention!

When asked, 62% of global consumers have stopped doing business with a brand or organisation due to poor customer service.

Don’t forget, when business decision-makers are out of the office, they are consumers too – it’s not a case of there being a magic firewall between their work and private lives!

In the future, the companies and organisations that will succeed are those who not only satisfy, but delight their customers, by solving their issues.

Be customer-centric.

What’s your customers’ biggest challenge? Do you know? Ask. Then, go and solve it.