Moving Toward a Digital, Customer-Centric Marketing Strategy

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To a large extent, the customers own your brand. You can’t run a successful business without your customers. Your customers are getting smarter far more than you can imagine, and their demand for a better customer experience is increasing.

If you want to acquire and retain more customers, think less of your competitors and product features, but rather, think more of the value you offer to your customers and the satisfaction they will derive from it.

The truth is 91% of unhappy customers will not willingly do business with you again.
A recent study has shown that by 2020, customer experience will overtake price and product as the key brand differentiators. However, a customer-centric company is beyond having a great customer service.

unhappy-customers

A customer-centric company offers great customer experience from customer discovery through the purchasing process and also, through the post-purchasing process. Being customer-centric is a strategy that puts your customers first and at the heart of your business.

Adopting a customer-centric marketing strategy gives you access to a lot of insights which you can use to enhance your customer experience, acquire new customers and retain your existing customers.

You can get data that’ll allow you to understand your customer’s behavior, their interest, and engagement. In that case, you’re more exposed to getting more ideas to create products which your customers will be interested in.

In fact, data from Deloitte and Touche shows that companies that are customer-centric are 60% more profitable than companies that are not customer-centric.

Here are 4 important customer-centric best practices you should have in mind when adopting this strategy:

1. Believe that customers come first

You’ve got to be passionate about your customers and of course be a true believer that customers come first.

Knowing that without your customers you’re not in business. Many B2B marketers talk about being customer-centric, but in reality, only are few truly practice it.

Use cutting-edge technologies that will help you give your customers the best experience they deserve. Below are 3 technologies that focus on delivering customer-centric services that you can leverage:

i). Co-browsing

Co-browsing is a new technology that allows your customers to share their browser with an expert for guidance when they’re on your website.

Have you been stuck trying to get something done on a brand’s website from your browser? Well, it’s the same with your customers.

The truth is, you have been losing a lot of customers and money as a result of this issue—your clients could get to your sales page and get confused about what to do next, what to click on or what to ignore.

Co-browsing was designed with customer engagement in mind. Unlike screen share, it only allows your customers to share their browser with experts. Remember that you’re not sharing your entire computer screen, just the browser.

Here are 3 benefits of adopting co-browsing technology in your business:

(a) Increase customer satisfaction: Customers are happy when you’re able to swiftly help them solve some technical challenges they’re facing in the most convenient way. Co-browsing gives that experience.

(b) Increase First-Call Resolution: Co-browsing puts you and your customer on the same screen, allowing you to see the error your customer is seeing. Obviously, this can help you to quickly spot challenging issues and resolve your customer’s pain properly.

(c) Reduces handling time: While you have the ability to see what your customers are seeing, you can also communicate with them via voice call or live chat so as to reduce the time when handling issues on your website.
Of course, there are several tools out there to help you achieve this, but Tagove has a resource to guide you if you run into muddy waters.

It’s truly an amazing technology every forward-thinking customer-centric brand must adopt.

Funny enough, co-browsing is easy to adopt, as you don’t need any complex installation to get started.

ii). Virtual reality (VR)

Virtual reality allows you to visualize lifelike imageries in all direction, making you feel like you are part of an entire scene. Sometimes, trying to explain some technical things to your customers can be very cumbersome.

However, if they’re able to have a visualization of it, it can even explain itself. Here’s a scenario: You want to help a customer fix an Internet-related problem, you make him wear a VR device so that as you explain, he sees exactly what you’re trying to portray. Cool, right?

That‘s what visual reality can bring to the table. A new study found that consumers feel connected to a brand that sponsors VR—about 71% agree that a brand that sponsors VR is forward thinking, 62% say they feel engaged.

virtual realty consumer adoption report

It’s sure a great technology. And we’re looking at getting the best of it come 2020.

iii). Beacons:

A Beacon is a powerful proximity-based technology. You can use it to give your prospects that are within your area—about 70 meters away, packets of information about the product and offers they’ll be interested in.

It’s an emerging technology; it hasn’t gotten wide adoption all over the world yet, however, it’ll keep your customers engaged with your brand and products, and also, give you insights on customer’s behavior.

2. Focus on what customer wants

Conducting market research is critical to the success of your business. Because you’re leveraging on customer-centric technologies, which allow you to know your customers more—their actions and behaviors with respect to your products and services.

When it comes to understanding what your ideal customers want, you can start by creating a simple survey and asking the right questions.

focus on customer
Image credit: saasbrand.

This will give you an edge, and help you to be innovative giving you insights and ideas you need to create products your customers are truly interested in.

3. Focus on building a relationship with your customer

For your customer-centric business to be successful you must see your business with your customers as a relationship, which is designed to give your customers a great product and service experience at all times.

Trust me, a good relationship with your customers is the fuel your business needs to grow.

Give your customers a reason never to turn back on your brand.
According to Seth Godin, “it’s easier to love a brand when the brand loves you back.”

seth godin

4. Focus your customer acquisition strategy on creating and keeping profitable and loyal customers.

It’s important to ensure that all your customer acquisition strategies are customer-centric with the primary objective of delighting your customers.

Take bold steps to reward your loyal customers with discounts and gifts. Zappos, for example, appreciates it customers by giving them the opportunity to Get a $15 Reward Code for their shopping. This has led to thousands of Apparel sales year over year.

zappos
Image credit: zappos.com.

Don’t be distracted by your competitors or hold the notion that a competitor is running against you, but instead, focus on delivering top notch service and improving your customer experience. That’s what counts.

Conclusion

Go beyond offering the same customer service as your competition. Why? Because your customers will not compare your customer service with your competition, but they’ll compare you to the best customer service they’ve ever received.

Give them the best and stand a chance to retain them for long-term. The future of every business is customer-centric, it’s changing the digital world. Embrace it.

Sam Suthar
Sawaram Suthar (Sam) is a Growth Strategist at Middleware, a unified cloud-native observability platform. He mainly works to build teams and scale marketing activities to achieve results. He has an MBA from the University of Pune.

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