What is customer focus?
A customer service strategy when you put your customers first in the process of decision-making is called customer focus. If you are running a customer-focused business, your company sets the customer experience and satisfaction over the revenue. Plus, your decision-making is also based on building strong customer relationships.
With the customer focus in place, brands offer responsive customer support and ask for and implement the tips collected from customer feedback. As a result, this approach helps you to deliver a personalized customer experience, and your clientele feels heard and comes to buy your products or services over and over.
Customer focus vs customer service: what’s the difference?
Customer focus and customer service are strategies aimed at improving customer relationships, boosting retention rates, and dropping customer churn.
Customer service covers the interactions between the clientele and support agent(s): one receives the product, and the other provides it or helps to use the product or service correctly.
Customer focus impacts the company culture and the workflow of everyone, and all decisions are based on customer interests—companies want to meet the needs and maximize the value delivered to the customer.
Customer focus
How to build a customer-focused culture?
Make your customers feel heard
Put yourself into customers’ shoes. This way, you will know what they really need, why they choose to buy or not to buy from you, what their goals are, and how to offer the best-fitting solution to their pain points.
Encourage collaboration
Many famous businesses know that the best ideas and products are created thanks to external and internal collaboration. For example, big names like Ikea, DHL, and Lego already involve their customers in the process of product development using their co-creation platforms.
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Combine data with empathy
The secret sauce of customer focus is a combo of empathy and a data-driven approach. Study your communication with customers on all channels you offer. It is crucial to know the pain points of your clientele and the best approach to helping them and, therefore, building long-lasting relationships.
Measure what matters
You have to ensure that your team listens to your customers. That is why the critical performance metrics must also be customer-focused. Include in your KPIs such metrics:
Leverage AI
AI-powered customer service can take over a lot of tedious, repetitive requests so your support agents can focus on complex issue resolutions that require escalation. AI leads to improved customer experiences and loyalty by, for example, personalizing interactions across channels with tools like targeted offers and multilingual support.
Create opportunities for learning
Creating a thriving customer-focused culture won't happen overnight. That is why you always need to update your support agents on the current state of things and provide them with useful resources to assist them in developing their customer-friendly skills and improving communication skills.
Use feedback to become better
It is very important to ask your customers what they think about your business and the services or products you provide them with. Their feedback will help you get valuable insights on how to stay customer-focused. You can use various methods for collecting their opinions, such as feedback surveys, follow-ups, or direct questions after receiving support.
Why is customer focus important?
Focusing on your customers and their experience with your product will bring you a competitive advantage. When your company is customer-focused, you can build stronger customer relationships, increase customer satisfaction, retain more customers, and grow your business. And ensure your team is proactive enough to match your customer needs.