Putting Your Customers First

Putting customers first is one key fundamental for successful businesses. It's something I've worked hard on over my career to always be the guy that stands up and say:

"Yes get that, but what about the customer? How is that going to impact the customer, or our ability to service them effectively..."

I've put together a list of ways you can help focus on this and deliver great results:

• Understand Customer Needs: You can do market research to understand your customers' needs of course, but don't forget all the sources you usually have at your fingertips. This includes your Contact Centre (if you have one), a valuable source of insight into the pain points for your customers and your team. You can also use surveys, feedback forms, your online reviews and social media to gather customer opinions.
• Personalize Customer Interactions: Use your customer data to personalize interactions, take what you know about them already and use that to provide tailored experiences. Address customers by their names (so important). You can also better lean into up sell and cross sell opportunities by recommending products, renewal offers etc based on what you know and how they have been interacting with you.
• Excellent Customer Service: This should go without saying, but make sure you provide prompt and effective customer support through various channels, including phone, email, chat, and social media. Make sure you invest in training your customer service team to be knowledgeable, empathetic, and proactive in addressing customer concerns. This doesn't just mean new starters, you should have a continuous training program for all to ensure all of your team feel confident and empowered to be the best they can be.
• Be Transparency and Honest: I've always found customers relate better, are more likely to buy into what your offering and are more understanding when things go wrong if you're transparent about your products, services, and pricing and how you'll support them in life. By clearly communicating any changes, delays, or issues that may affect your customers, they'll be more forgiving (in most cases) and it won't effect their advocacy.
• Build Relationships: I'd put a focus on building long-term relationships rather than one-time transactions, particularly with a subscription model as you want to keep those customers with you as long as possible to get the return on the investment you made to acquire them. Engage with customers on social media, respond to comments, show you're listening, and participate in conversations. Share news stories about your business, but with a focus on why this benefits the customer. Create a customer experience focused lifecycle that keeps the customer engaged throughout their time with you.
• Customer Feedback: This is a huge one for me. Yes ask for customer feedback, but only do it if you're going to do something with it, otherwise you're wasting everyone's time. You should actively seek customer feedback and make sure you use it to improve your products and services. when you implement changes based on customer suggestions and let them know you really listened and do actually care about improving your products and services.
• User-Friendly Products and Services: Design products and services with the end user in mind. Ensure that your offerings are easy to use and meet the needs of your target audience. Make sure your products and services are accessible and cater to all, or create bespoke ones that do, so make sure you leave no demographic left out in the cold.
• Reward Loyalty: This is a tricky one to balance as you have to work hard to retain your customers by offering something that works for them, but also means you're not giving away your bottom line. ind ways to value add, and have exclusive deals only for renewing customers. Oh and keep delivering brilliant service and experiences, that counts for a lot and your agents can lean on that during renewal conversations. If you're no better than the rest in that area, you'll be simply competing on price and no-one wants to go there.

You have to commit to this being an ongoing process. Customer needs change over time, as does your business, so putting your customer front and centre needs a continuous focus. Customer experience isn't something you do some work towards, earn a badge and then sit back and relax, its an ongoing beast that needs to be evolved and nurtured.