Customer focus: 6 tips for turning your company into a customer-focused business.

Customer expectations are higher than ever before, and customers are scrutinising your business more intensely than ever. They’re comparing their experience with your brand to the easy, fast, and personalised experiences they have with the best of the best. And it’s these customer-focused businesses that reap the benefits of renewed loyalty and competitive advantage.

With 89 per cent of companies competing primarily on the basis of customer experience, customer focus has never been more important. But there remains a gap in how many companies think they’re customer-focused, compared to how many customers agree. In fact, while 80 per cent of companies believe they deliver “super experiences,” only 8 per cent of customers hold that same opinion!

The good news is that customer focus can be improved. And it starts by deepening your understanding of what customer focus means and building an effective customer-focus strategy.

What is customer focus?

Customer focus means putting your customers’ needs first. Customer-focused businesses foster a company culture dedicated to enhancing customer satisfaction and building strong customer relationships.

But customer focus is not a responsibility that falls only on customer support, or any single team, to earn for the entire business. While customer service skills are key to customer focus, customer-focused companies show that the customer experience matters across the organisation, at every step of the customer journey. This includes:

• The honesty of their marketing campaigns
• The transparency of their pricing models
• The ease of their sales cycle
• The quality of their actual products or services

“Customer focus is the lens by which you analyse all your interactions with your customers,” says Jonathan Brummel, Senior Manager, Premier Support at Zendesk. “It’s a core value for who you want to be as a company and how you want your customers to feel about you.”

"Customer focus is a core value for who you want to be as a company and how you want your customers to feel about you."Jonathan Brummel, Senior Manager, Premier Support, Zendesk

The importance of customer focus

Customer focus is the foundation for customer loyalty because it’s your promise to your customers that you’ll put them first. And according to the Zendesk Customer Experience Trends Report 2020, 74 per cent of customers feel loyal to a particular company, with 52 per cent reporting that they go out of their way to buy from their favourite brands.

What’s more, roughly half of customers say they would switch to a competitor after just one bad experience. And that number jumps to 80 per cent in the case of more than one bad experience. Becoming a customer-focused organisation is important for helping you ensure that customers leave the experience feeling good about your brand. That’s because it requires you to hold them as the guiding force behind everything you do.

But becoming a customer-focused company does not mean you’re suddenly a perfect business that never makes mistakes. That kind of mindset is neither practical nor honest. Rather, customer focus is important for building customer relationships that are more human. This involves learning from your customers and using those valuable insights to get better.

Tips for building an effective customer focus strategy

There are two levels to building an effective customer focus strategy: the emotional level and the operational level. A great customer focus strategy enables you to form real, honest and transparent relationships with your customers. It also guides you in setting the right tools and processes in place to do so. Here are six tips to help keep both relationship management and process improvement top of mind:

1) Encourage collaboration

Becoming a customer-focused organisation requires teams to work together to create a consistent, overall better experience. In fact, more than 70 per cent of customers expect companies to collaborate on their behalf.

Support teams and sales teams might collaborate so:

• An agent can flag sales when a customer is interested in learning about a new product
• A sales rep can redirect a more technical question to an agent who specialises in that area

And collaboration pays off—according to Benchmark research, sales and support teams that collaborate have:

• More leads
• More deals created
• More deals won

But collaboration should not slow down your teams’ productivity, because that only makes things more complicated for the customer. That’s why effectively collaborating on the customer’s behalf requires a connective layer that integrates customer data across departments. This allows teams to share insights without:

• Disrupting their workflow
• Exposing the customer to what’s going on behind the scenes

2) Make your customers feel heard

Behind every customer is a story. But customers don’t want to have to repeat that story every time they interact with your brand. And if customers feel ignored because they have to repeat themselves, they won’t be likely to remember your company as customer focused.

“Making the customer feel heard is a huge part of customer focus,” says Brummel. “And when they don’t feel heard, that’s when the experience can quickly go wrong.”

Imagine having to reintroduce yourself to a co-worker every time you see them in the office kitchen and remind them of what you last spoke about. It’s neither personal nor customer-focused, but that’s often how businesses communicate with their customers.

To ensure satisfied customers who feel heard, companies will need that same connective layer. This gives them the full story on the customer, such as:

• Their name
• Account information
• When they last got in touch

This arm teams with the relevant context and conversation history they need to give customers the personalised experiences they expect.

3) Meet your customers where they are

It might seem easier to focus on a single communication channel and providing a great experience there. But communicating according to your customers’ channels of choice is a powerful driver of loyalty, according to recent Zendesk research.

The data is clear: A great customer experience is one that’s easy. Customers don’t wish to put effort into reaching your brand, and nor should they. That’s why customer-focused companies meet their customers where they are. This allows customers to reach out however and whenever they wish.

Looking into the demographics of your customers and considering the types of questions you see most often can be eye-opening. Industry best practices might tell you to offer a particular channel. But you may find that a significant number of your customers prefer a mobile-first option. You might consider adding WhatsApp, SMS or another mobile messaging channel because that’s where your customers are.

Again, that 360 view of the customer will be important for connecting conversations across channels. It ensures context moves with the customer. This helps your business provide fast and personal responses no matter when or how they reach out.

4) Use feedback to get better

Knowing how to handle customer feedback is another important factor in becoming a customer-focused company. Instead of approaching customer complaints as a game of dodgeball, customer-focused companies:

• Amplify the voice of the customer
• Use their feedback to create a better experience

This might include:

• Sending your customers surveys
• Opening an online community where customers can share their experiences with your product or service or vote on new feature requests

Creating a feedback loop with your customers is important. Your relationship with them, like any healthy relationship, should be two-sided.

“Treating customers like partners and collaborators as opposed to consumers of your goods is one of the first steps to creating a customer-focused culture,” says Brummel.

5) Combine data with empathy

With the increasing amount of data available, companies no longer have to guess what their customers want or decide for them. Instead, they can look to the trends.

But taking a customer-focused approach to data does not mean using data blindly. Rather, it involves combining data with empathy. This means:

• Adding context to data
• Applying data compassionately
• Using data to enhance customer intimacy—developing insights into who is using your product and what they are looking for.

For instance, your product team might align a product update with customer support data to ensure change is relevant to those it impacts. Or, instead of sending every customer the same email, a marketing team might:

• Adjust content based on where each customer is in the customer journey
• Segment content base on what emails a customer has previously opened

But siloed data often prevents companies from using it emphatically and in a way that truly benefits the customer. That’s because they lack the full context to do so. To start, you’ll need to connect insights across systems and software to effectively manage and interpret the data.

6) Leverage AI to proactively meet customers’ needs

Customer-focused businesses are not just reactive to what their customers need, they also proactively meet their expectations. And with the help of AI, proactive experiences don’t have to be complicated or costly. For instance, support teams might use machine learning to predict customer satisfaction to proactively reduce customer complaints. Or, sales teams might deploy a chatbot to proactively welcome customers, before they abandon their shopping basket or demo request form due to lingering questions.

4 examples of customer focus

Even after building an effective customer focus strategy, becoming a customer-focused business does not happen overnight. It takes practice and continuous adjustment to get right. Here are a few examples of how to become a customer-focused company from four companies who did.

• Zappos

  To show that customer experience matters across the business, Zappos connects the organisation through customer-centric values. For example, every employee takes customer service calls during their first two weeks at the company.

• The Four Seasons

  The Four Seasons redefined luxury with its white-glove customer service based on building real, human relationships with guests. Guests can reach out to the hotel via Twitter, Facebook Messenger or SMS, just as they would a friend, to arrange spa reservations, get restaurant recommendations, and access special services.

• Postmates

  Postmates’ CX team partners with their product team and analytics team to ensure customer feedback informs key product decisions. This drives measurable improvements, such as reducing customer cancellations with product updates.

• Birchbox

  Unhappy customers are inevitable. What’s important to becoming customer focused is how you handle them. Birchbox uses service recovery to flag customer complaints and then turn the experience round to repair the relationship.

Customer focus quotes

Here are some of our favourite customer focus quotes to keep you motivated as you build your customer focus strategy.

• “Customer service shouldn’t just be a department, it should be the entire company.”
  -Tony Hsieh, CEO of Zappos

• “The reason for our success is no secret. It’s the Golden Rule–the simple idea that we should treat others the way we would want to be treated.”
  -Isadore Sharp, Founder, Chairman & CEO of Four Seasons Hotels and Resorts

• “Our customers’ voices are vital when it comes to product innovation. Listening to and acting on customer feedback prevents myopic thinking and helps us constantly improve.”
  -Hetal Shah, CX, Product & Operations leader at Postmates

• “Negative interactions happen in any contact centre–it’s a fact of life. Our role as CX leaders is to ensure our agents learn from these negative interactions and then address the issue directly with customers.”
  -Deja Whitehead, senior manager of Customer Operations & Communications at Birchbox

When businesses start becoming more customer focused, they become a more human brand that’s driven by relationships, rather than profits or requirements. If loyalty is something your company is hoping to improve, try adjusting your focus to the customer—you may surprise yourself with what you can accomplish with a simple change in frame of mind.