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How to Create a Customer Centric Strategy for Your Business?
Let's face it, your business can prosper or die down depending on the customer experience. The first thing that anyone would do before purchasing a product or subscribing to a service is read customer reviews. It is almost a given that businesses success nowadays depends entirely on customers' satisfaction and efficient support. The business structure, marketing, assets, and sales all need to focus their attention on giving customers a most satisfying experience in order to make their business grow and boost their sales. No matter how great your products and services are, you cannot make do without the customers' approval and happiness. This is why you need to create a strategy that is customer-centric for your business.
If you plan on building a customer-centric strategy, you have to commit to a set of values and apply them across your entire organization. This way, you put customers first and foremost in all decisions. It will not be easy to gain the ultimate customer satisfaction, and it doesn't always come naturally. But if you follow certain strategies and you succeed, it will have a direct and positive impact on your revenue and business reputation.
What Does It Mean to Be Customer-Centric?
Being a customer-centric company means that the customer's satisfaction comes first in all decision makings, plans, sales, and products launch. This means that at every point in your customer journey, from Google search that will help customers find you to their payment and delivery stages, is an opportunity to prove that you have exceptional customer service and that your customers will always come first. This means that the customers' needs, interests, and desires are prioritized over the long term over the short-term business goals.
A customer-centric corporation usually uses the best software to collect data and info from different channels and sources to ensure that their customers are getting relevant communications at the right time. Some of this software include customer relationship management CRM) software, which is built and developed to enhance your communication and relations with customers and clients.
If you look back yourself, you would notice that the times you've received bad customer service from a certain company that only cares about money, you would not have tried to use their services or products again.
Meanwhile, companies that you received exceptional services and experiences from can be some of your most liked companies. Unfortunately, not every company takes a customer-centric approach. However, remember that if you're providing a service or a product that other companies are providing too, then your customer support can be the first thing to pick people's interest.
Each business model needs a different approach, depending on the industry, market, and customers they are targeting. However, one thing will always be prevailing, and that is the success rate in relation to customer satisfaction.
Why Is Customer Centricity Important?
There is data from various studies that prove how customer-centricity improves revenue and financial performance and provides businesses with a competitive advantage over others on the market. Here are some benefits that can help you better understand the importance of customer-centricity.
- Many American consumers admit that they have spent more money to pursue business with companies that deliver great services.
- Customer centricity increases customer retention.
- Increases business profit.
- It has been proven that it is much more expensive to get a new customer than it is to keep a current one.
- Customers in the United States are willing to spend more money on companies that provide excellent customer service.
And customers aren't the only beneficiaries; building a customer-centric company also empowers employees to make good decisions and do their best work, so customer centricity is both a growth strategy and a way to build a strong company culture.
Best Practices for Creating an Effective Customer-Centric Strategy
If you plan on creating a customer-centric strategy for your business, you will need to follow some practices that enable you to collect meaningful info about your customers, address their needs, and meet their expectations. There are many things you can do to attract new customers and keep the ones you currently have. But in order for you to become a customer-centric company, here are some of the things you can follow:
Hire for customer success
When you're hiring new employees, make sure that you're looking for talents that can work in favor of the customers. Remember that employees are the front-facing workforce that will have direct contact with customers and therefore shape the overall customer experience.
Invest in customer service
When you're running a customer-centric company, you should not see customer support as a business cost, but rather as a revenue generator. Supporting customers is the driving force behind the growth of your company.
This means that your customer support team is the closest to your customers and so, you need to invest in such teams more. What you can do is invest in your customer service team by doing the following:
- Hire people that know how to handle customers.
- Pay your customer support agents more.
- Encourage your customer support agents and reward them for their hard work.
- Maximize your potential with self-service support.
- Use good CRM software to help enhance customer interactions and relations.
- Hire more people. Make sure you have enough employees to do customer support instead of pressuring a few. Having more people means more productivity and less burnout.
- Try to hold seminars about customer service and its effectiveness in your company to encourage your customer support agents to do their best to help customers.
Get everyone involved
It all starts with the culture of the company. If you help everyone in the company understand what the customer really wants, you will be able to end up with a whole customer-centric culture. This includes your engineering, product development team, sales, general managers, and all key decision-makers.
All-hand support is always needed for a customer-centric company to prosper. Once you get everyone in the company involved, you will start noticing more customer satisfaction and, therefore, an increase in sales and revenue.
Know what your customers want
This is a key requirement for any successful business. You need to know what your customers are asking for. In order to do that, you will need to gather some qualitative feedback to help you get a better understanding of your customers' needs. You can do that through comments, surveys, web forms, reviews, etc.
Check what customers are saying on social media and make sure you are responding to their inquiries and complaints and fixing any issues that they face.
Personalize customer experience
Most customers admit that they are more likely to purchase from a business that addresses them by name, knows their purchase history, and recommends brands based on their previous purchase records.
You can personalize your customers' experiences by categorizing them into segments and distributing relevant content for each segment. You should be able to do that using Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software.
Tie compensation to the customer
You should reinforce your customer-centric culture by creating a compensation program. Whenever a mistake is made, and it affects the customer's purchase or end product, you need to be able to compensate them and make it known to your employees. Compensating the customer when a mistake happens has proven to be an effective strategy.
Recommended CRM Software
If you were wondering which CRM can help you boost your sales, optimize your business, save you money, and most importantly, make your customer experience excellent, you might want to go through this section. Here are our top picks with their features, plans, and prices:
1. Monday.com CRM
We can confidently say that Monday.com CRM is our top pick for the best CRM to make your customer experience exceptional. It allows your team members to communicate and make decisions together by providing them with a unified platform for business. It also offers resourceful and unique features and functions that are built in an organized way with a simple user interface that will not waste your employees' time.
Some of the features that are included in Monday.com CRM are:
- Exportable contact database
- Customization
- Total visibility
- Mobile-optimized
- Constant monitoring
- Open API
- Lead/Pipeline management
- Tracks prospects, clients & deals
- Consolidated contact info
Monday.com offers its users five different plans that include various and useful features that will boost your business and reduce its costs. Here are the plans as provided by Monday.com CRM:
- The Individual plan
This is a freemium plan that offers you features like unlimited boards to organize your data, unlimited docs to collaborate with your team, +200 templates that you can customize and choose from, more than 20 column types, Android, and iOS apps, and a 500 MB file storage.
- The Basic plan: $8/user/month
This plan provides your business with everything included in the individual plan in addition to lead, contact, and deal management, unlimited visual sales pipelines, unlimited contacts, full mobile CRM, document management, full API access, unlimited free viewers, unlimited custom fields, and a 5 GB file storage.
- The Standard plan: $10/user/month
The Standard plan includes everything mentioned in the Basic plan plus features like timeline view, guess access, calendar view, sales analytics, MailChimp integration, automation up to 250 actions per month, 2-way email integration with Gmail and Outlook, integrations up to 250 actions per month, and 20 GB file storage.
- The Pro plan: $16/user/month
The Pro plan includes all the features in the Standard plan plus customized notifications, time tracking, formula column, automation up to 25,000 actions per month, marketing activity management, advanced permission, workflow, and approval automation, private boards and docs, integrations up to 25,000 actions per month, and a 100 GB file storage.
- The Enterprise plan: Quote-based
The Enterprise plan has everything in the Pro plan plus features like VIP 24/7 priority support, advanced reporting and analytics, enterprise-scale automation and integration, enterprise-grade security and governance, tailored onboarding, multi-level permissions, a dashboard that combines up to 50 boards, and a 1000 GB file storage.
You can request a 14-day free trial for any of the above plans before making any commitments.
2. Zendesk CRM
Zendesk is our second top CRM software that will help streamline your customer and client communications while providing you with the right insights and tools to optimize your campaign's performances to reach wider audiences and generate more revenue.
It includes the following features and more:
- Sales email intelligence
- Native dialer
- Integrations and API
- Sales prospecting
- Sales reporting and analytics
- Mobile CRM
Zendesk offers four business plans that are:
- Sell Team plan: $19/user/month, billed annually
This plan includes resourceful features like email integrations, 3 paid users, 1 custom sales pipeline, built-in click-to-dial and call recording, mobile CRM, and apps and integrations.
- Sell Professional: $49/user/month, billed annually
This plan includes features such as email integration, unlimited paid users, 1 custom sales pipeline, built-in click-to-dial & call recording, fully-featured mobile CRM, apps & integrations, personalized bulk emailing, unlimited email templates, sales goals & forecasting, unlimited custom fields, and advanced call analytics.
- Sell Enterprise: $99/user/month, billed annually
This plan offers all the features included in the Sell professional plan in addition to 2 sales pipelines, power dial, personalized bulk emailing, unlimited email templates, activity reports, advanced permissions, product catalog, load and deal scoring, task automation, and customized notifications.
- Sell Elite: $199/user/month
This plan includes all the features that are available in the sell enterprise plan plus open API, rep performance reports, advanced sales insight reports, and success insight reports.
3. Salesforce CRM
Salesforce is a customizable CRM software that allows your sales team to access real-time customer info from one place. It enables your team to pull insights from dashboards and reports to help you generate leads. It is a cloud-based system that offers you a mobile application to make managing your business more accessible on your phone wherever you are.
Salesforce offers four types of clouds, each has several plans under it, and each is customized to fit its field's and department's needs. The clouds that Salesforce offers are:
Sales Cloud | Starts at $25/month
This cloud service manages all sales processes; this includes things like generating leads and turning the lead into a sale and what comes after the sale. It offers a 360-degree view of the customer journey giving the user full control of each customer's sale process. The user can also access company info like past purchases, email history, social media statistics, and internal documents shared between team members.
The price of this cloud begins at $25 for the Essential tier, $75 for professional, $150 for Enterprise, and $300 for Unlimited.
Service Cloud | Starts at $25/month
If your business seeks a quick solution, then this is the best service for you. It gives users the ability to design customized service portals, from which they can allow customers to help themselves to self-service options. All customers' questions, complaints, and feedback are attended to as soon as possible when you use this cloud. This is because this Salesforce cloud enables you to automate responses to customers' inquiries. The software even offers users useful suggestions to set up workflows that will affect automated responses.
The Service Cloud offers Essential, Professional, Enterprise, and Unlimited tiers with the same pricing from $25 to $300.
Marketing Cloud | Starting at $400/month
Whether you are trying to transform a request for info into a sale or you need to automate email marketing campaigns and organize posts on social media, this marketing cloud service provides all the tools you need to carry out all of your marketing activities.
Some of the studios available in this cloud are Email studio, advertising studio, and Social studio. You can also integrate third-party apps to make the process of marketing even more effective.
Commercial Cloud | Quote based
The Commercial Cloud supports online shopping, and it can be quite a helpful service for retail businesses. Any business can create a smooth online shopping experience for its customers using this CRM service. If you want to know the pricing for this cloud, you will need to contact the Salesforce team to get a direct quote.