Customer centric companies have 2x higher average revenue vis-a-vis companies that are not according to a recent EY report. Welcome to first in a series of seven business growth pillars that can help your company scale up. So here are 5 ways to be a more customer centric company.
Let me share a personal story where I got very present to the need to be a customer centric company. I used to be in the rice business, over a decade back. We took part in an exhibition where we had an opportunity to interact with our end customers, and typically, those were housewives. Over three days we interacted with over 2,000 housewives. And we kept on asking them: “Why do you buy our rice? We got some surprising feedback.
90% of the housewives said that they loved our product because the rice was fat. Yes you read that correctly: FAT!
So we started to look into this deeper, and we looked at what did that mean for the rice to be fat? And we were able to identify that one cup of our raw rice was able to produce four cups of cooked rice.
We found out that the competitor’s rice was only able to produce two and a half cups of cooked rice. So our brand was delivering tremendous value. This is something that we had never even communicated to our customers. It’s our customers who were happy with the product, telling us this why they were buying our rice.
This new insight completely changed the way in which we marketed our product. We found a way to articulate the reason why customers bought our rice in our marketing and sales. We were able to grow our revenues by over 100% because of this new insight.
So let’s cover 5 simple ways in which your company can be more customer centric.
1. Customer Centric Companies Get feedback
Proactively take feedback from your customers. And in this day and age, it’s so much easier. Use tools like Survey Monkey for online surveys.
Use every customer interaction to solicit feedback. For a customer centric company, feedback is the breakfast of champions.
2. Customer Centric Companies Use CRM
Customer Relationship Management software helps you be more customer centric. Every time you have an interaction with either a prospect or an existing customer, always have it recorded. CRM software helps you manage this easily.
I personally use a free cloud based software called Hubspot. This software helps me track the interaction from a lead, qualify a prospect and then turn into a sale. This is a great way to track how many leads you have and the status on each.
Other good ones to consider out there include:
Staying in touch with existing customer and prospects is an important part of marketing. You can use some simple email marketing options like:
- Constant Contact
- Get Response (I use this one)
3. Customer centric companies use technology
Use technology to get closer to your customers. Is there an app that you can build that can reduce friction and make it much easier for you to deal with your customer, stay in touch, and find out what they want? Is there some mobile-related thing that you can do? So it just helps you get real-time feedback that much quicker. How can you use technology to better serve your customers?
4. Customer centric companies create value on a consistent basis.
Align your systems and processes to deliver consistent value to your clients. For example, once we understood the reason why people were buying our rice, we completely changed our souring and production processes in that way that enhanced that. So when we were buying the raw material, doing the quality control to the production we looked at ways to enhance our unique serving proposition.
5. Customer centric companies consistently build their brand
Support all your customer centric activities with consistent brand building. I remember changing our packaging, our messaging. We started to specifically state that, that one cup of raw rice is going to give you four cups of cooked rice.
We had cooking demos at major supermarkets and retail outlets. We advertised and took part in other customer facing exhibitions. We undertook competitions and shared the best recipes using our rice.
Incorporating customer insights in our brand building led to increasing market share and sales.
Leave a comment below with how your company is customer centric.
Please click here for an overview of the 7 pillars of scalable business growth.
2 Responses