You have probably heard the term “customer-focused” before – but what about “customer-obsessed”?
Customer obsession is considered by many market leaders to be the future of customer experience and describes the actions of companies that consistently and regularly create new customer experience value. These companies consistently gather feedback and prioritize customer needs in all business objectives. A customer-obsessed brand is naturally more concerned with satisfying existing customers than finding new ones.
Customer obsession is about cultivating retention and loyalty among your customers. If you are a customer-obsessed company, you are not only looking for great ways to capture the attention of new customers, but you are actively working to strengthen relationships with your existing community through meaningful interactions. This may mean investing in automation tools so you can provide more consistent 24/7 service to your customers or leveraging data to provide more personalized service.
The Qualities of a Customer Obsessed Company
Becoming truly customer-obsessed requires a lot of work. Business leaders must carefully consider every interaction with their target audience and explore new tools and technologies that can make those interactions more immersive. Fortunately, the benefits of being a customer-obsessed company also significantly outweigh the negatives.
If you can build a reputation as a customer-obsessed brand, you can improve your chances of not only retaining valuable customers but turning those customers into advocates for your company. Remember that an increase in customer retention of about 5% is associated with an increase in profits of about 25%, according to Bain and Co.
So how can you tell if you are “customer-obsessed”? Here are some of the qualities you’ll find in a customer-obsessed company.
1. Customer retention comes before acquisition
Probably the most important factor that distinguishes a customer-obsessed company is its commitment to prioritizing customer retention over customer acquisition. Most companies focus on marketing and sales to attract new customers and close deals. Customer-obsessed companies take a more methodical approach and focus on providing exceptional customer service throughout the customer journey.
For example, when a customer is added to a company’s customer pool, they receive a digital onboarding and order management experience that introduces them to the company’s services. After the purchase, the company continues to look for ways to increase the value of the relationship for the customer.
Although customer-obsessed companies still strive to attract new customers, their focus is on making existing customers as satisfied as possible. This reduces the risk of customer turnover and reduces the amount of effort a company has to put into attracting new customers. After all, when potential customers see a company with many satisfied customers, they are more likely to want to interact with that brand as well.
2. Every department aligns around customer success
Many old-fashioned companies make the mistake of trying to assign the task of customer experience and satisfaction to only one part of the company. While it’s good to have a dedicated customer service department, every part of your company should be invested in customer success. True customer obsession only works when everyone on your team focuses on the same goals.
If you want to become a truly customer-obsessed brand, the alignment of your teams is critical. Give your team members insight into what they can do to improve the customer experience and give each group their own goals. Remember that you can also leverage tools that make an enterprise-wide approach to customer success more effective.
For example, a process automation platform can help you automate different business processes for different members of key teams. Automating these elements means your employees will spend less time completing repetitive tasks and more time focusing on the things they can really wow your target audience with. With less pressure to find time for mundane tasks, your team members may even be able to come up with creative ideas on how to impress your existing customer community.
3. Customer service is proactive, not reactive
Responsive customer service is the process of responding to your customers’ problems as they arise. You wait for your customers to contact you when something goes wrong, and then take action as quickly as possible to resolve the problem. Most customer-first companies emphasize fixing problems as quickly as possible to reduce customer frustration.
But customer-obsessed brands go a step further by being proactive about customer service. Network service providers can proactively monitor what’s going on in a network and be the first to know when errors are on the horizon. Proactive monitoring allows you to identify and fix problems before they have a chance to affect your customers.
A proactive approach to customer service lets your customers know that your company is always looking out for their best interests, even when they are not buying items. Proactive customer service often occurs alongside other intuitive methods of customer service in a modern business. For example, high-performing brands today often invest more money in things like self-service tools so customers can resolve their own issues without having to speak to an agent, using troubleshooting systems, virtual agents, and FAQs.
4. Customer feedback is a driving factor
It’s hard to call yourself customer-obsessed if you are not actively listening to your customers and acting on their insights. Feedback is one of the most valuable tools a company can draw upon. By listening to your customers’ reviews, testimonials, and other forms of feedback, you can learn more about what really matters to your target customers.
Before making any changes to the customer experience, you can review the feedback you have gathered so far and make more informed decisions based on it. For example, you might find that your customers regularly use your chat service to ask simple questions, but that they would rather have an agent call them back when an issue becomes too complex for an automated system.
Statistics and data collected by your software and tracking tools can be useful as a starting point for business decisions, but nothing is more valuable than a real, human insight from a customer who engages with your brand or product.
5. Data is at the heart of business performance
As mentioned earlier, feedback and testimonials are just one form of data a company can collect to learn more about its customers’ customer journey and needs. It’s also important to collect many other types of data. Today, companies can collect information about how often their customers contact the service desk and how often they use a service performance dashboard.
With AI tools and chatbots, you can even learn more about the most common problems your customers have with your product or service, or what words typically come up when a customer asks you for help. The more data you collect, the more informed your decision-making process becomes. The key to success in using data in customer-facing businesses is to make sure you are properly collecting, refining, and using the information you have.
Data silos and inaccuracies can lead to dangerous errors in your analytics. If you have someone on your team who can understand and analyze your data, you should avoid any common problems. Alternatively, you can save yourself time and manpower by investing in automated tools to analyze and sort data.
Ready to be More Customer Obsessed?
In today’s world, customer experience is the most important differentiator for any business. As customer expectations continue to evolve, no company can afford to underestimate the importance of customer-centricity.
Moving from a customer-centric operation to a customer-obsessed company culture could be the key to earning your brand more loyal customers and satisfied advocates. Contact Bulb Tech today to learn how we can help you become more customer-obsessed.
Do you want to become customer-obsessed company?
Contact us and reduce your AHT by 50%