Everyone has heard the expression: ‘the customer always comes first’. It's been said so much across industries and sectors that it’s become almost empty of meaning.

But when you think about it, it doesn’t make it any less true just because you've heard something a lot.

Whatever industry or sector that you’re in, the customer is your business. Everything you do, from product development to support, must revolve around the needs and wants of the customer.

This may seem like an obvious point that everyone in a business would know. However, countless businesses of all shapes and sizes, from retail to SaaS, have found themselves preoccupied with internal company goals. Customers turn into faceless sales targets instead of people with needs. Product development prioritizes vanity projects that have little to no value for end-users.

These toxic preoccupations spell trouble for future growth. The antidote is to transform the business strategy to make it customer focused. This way, all actions, projects, and campaigns will share the ultimate goal to solve the needs of the target customer.

By acknowledging the voice of the customer, a business strategy can turn stagnation into growth by improving user retention rates and increasing customer lifetime value (CLTV). This article will explain how exactly it does this.

What is customer focus?

The main way to be customer focused is to treat customers not as potential sale, but as a human with a problem that needs solving. A customer-focused company exists solely to solve these problems. They always listen to the voice of the customer and use it to determine the evolution of their product.

Customer focus is not just an idealistic theory— it’s been tested and proven by leaders in their industries. Companies who have adopted it into their business strategy and listen to the voice of the customer drive revenue that’s 5-7% higher than others in their industry. 

Even more important is that companies that are customer focused have a retention rate and customer lifetime value that’s 1.5 times higher than those who aren't. It's clear that those companies with a focus on the customer have a more sustainable engine of growth.

Why is it important to be customer focused? 

The outcome of using a customer-focused approach to running your business is clear when it comes to revenues and customer retention. But what other benefits can it bring?

Happy users make great brand advocates

Acquiring new customers is the key to growth. But developing a relationship with your existing customers is equally important and is often overlooked by companies. Customers willing to promote and recommend your brand are a powerful word-of-mouth marketing tool. They'll sell your product out of their own volition because they believe in it. However, brand advocates can only exist when your company and its product offer a customer experience worth advocating.

You can accurately meet customer need

Many articles about customer focus talk about it as if it’s only for Customer Support teams. However, this is narrow-sighted. Customer orientation is a must for product development and marketing, too. As product managers build the product roadmap, they should be aware of the requests and problems that customers face product roadmap; they should be aware of the requests and problems that customers are facing and what’s creating real value.

The Product team needs Customer Support to build a feedback loop that regularly provides information on the voice of the customer. Customer Support is in a unique position to track customer sentiment in real time. These insights are crucial for the Product team, which needs to decide what feature ideas to prioritize in the product backlog. The long-term goal of any customer-focused product team is to build something that customers love. But this is only possible if they’re aware of what customers are thinking in the first place.

Improved user retention & conversion rates

Some companies tend to treat marketing as just another tool in the toolbox for sales. Of course, this is a serious misconception of marketing and its potential to contribute to company growth as a whole. Through a customer-focused approach, marketers can construct a positive perception of the company and build a strong association between customer pain points and the brand.

By truly considering their customers and what interests them, marketers can create relevant and relatable content that builds awareness and trust in the brand. They will also be able to launch campaigns that connect with current customers. This is important as they will feel valued and supported through this, so they are much more likely to stick around for the long haul. After all, keeping customers is crucial for sustainable growth — acquiring a new customer can be anywhere between 5 to 25 times more expensive than being able to retain an existing one.

Marketers should keep a close eye on their products and also that of their competitors. They must know the product’s position in the market to know what’s doing well and what’s missing. They can then, for example, use these insights to construct marketing campaigns that point out the particular problems their product solves that others in the market cannot.

5 examples of customer focused strategies — pillars 

1. Be addicted to helping your user

This is about going beyond simply writing customer personas and ending it there. Your company needs to better understand who your customers are and what they value. This requires a more sophisticated method of tracking customer data and feedback, where you can granulate what’s been said into manageable segments. This can then be used to better understand what your customers think and feel over time.

If you think you need more customer feedback than what you can find from user reviews, there are always NPS, CSAT, and CES surveys you can send to your mailing list.

2. Hire user-focused people 

Your employees are the core of your business and how it’s perceived. They are the representatives of your brand and should reflect your company values. As a customer-focused business, this means employees should work to help the customer meet their needs and have a great experience, not just hit targets and meet KPIs. Metrics are humans, and employees need to treat customers as more than just numbers.

3. Tweak priorities & processes when necessary

A customer-focused business shouldn’t just collect user feedback but take actionable steps to improve the product based on that feedback. For example, if a particular pain point keeps cropping up in feedback, the product team must take it seriously and prioritize it into the product backlog. Similarly, if customers start reaching out to customer support through different channels, they should accommodate this form of communication.

4. Always improve the practices of customer support

Customer Support needs to go above and beyond for the customer and rip up the traditional support manual. They must do more than put out fires or initiate damage control. The goal should be to develop meaningful customer relationships and support the customer experience long after purchase.

The ideal for support is understanding customers so well that they can anticipate their needs ahead of time. It takes support beyond being a purely reactive force. This proactive approach cultivates stronger relationships with customers cultivates stronger relationships with customers that are built on great experience and trust,  increasing retention rates and customer lifetime value in the long run.  

5. Train your entire team in supporting users

The Support Team should have the right skills to deal with customers with various situations and moods. They must be patient, empathetic, good at listening and communicating, and skilled problem solvers. To ensure these attributes are present across the team, it’s a good idea to implement training that includes lessons about the product, using emotional intelligence, crisis management, troubleshooting effectively, and caring for the customer throughout their journey with the product.

Other teams would also benefit from experience working with customer service to see what customers are like. By experiencing this, team members will have the chance to get a real feel for the customer, and therefore be more able to provide a customer-centric product or service.

3 successful companies that are customer focused

HubSpot

The mission of ‘solving the needs of the customer’ is rarely stronger than at HubSpot. They make reaching out to support extremely accessible to every customer. In fact, they’ve graded the depth of support provided based on the complexity of the plan a particular customer has purchased. Though, they provide a full range of customer-centric services to all.

HubSpot also provides a comprehensive selection of resources for their users, including a knowledge base, an academy, and technical documentation. They also publish content that teaches customers how to improve their companies' processes and strategies.

Moreover, HubSpot runs a community for its customers and other interested parties. This is an excellent form of customer orientation, as a community area will make customers feel part of something exclusive, where they can take part in conversations that interest them and can get tips and advice from like-minded people. This sense of togetherness under a brand is key to creating customer loyalty. Effective app store management starts with handling reviews - find out how to do it right.

HubSpot also carefully listens to its customers and has provided them with an ideas section of the community forum, where feature requests can be posted and discussed with HubSpot community managers.

All of this shows how much HubSpot has invested and thought about customer care and nurturing. It’s a masterclass in providing free value at every stage of the customer journey that will pay off massively down the line. Much like tackling 5 star review responses will pay off for you - if you do it well.

Toyota

The motto that drives the working of every department at Toyota is the Japanese saying: Genchi Genbutsu. In English, this means ‘see for yourself.' There have been times at Toyota when engineers rented out new or yet-to-be-released models of Toyota cars and drove them around certain locations to get a feel for how the customer would experience the drive. They also drove around and spoke to motorists who matched their target audience to find out the kind of car and features they would value.

This level of communication with potential prospects in a natural environment (essentially, outside of a focus group) has enabled Toyota to have an unparalleled vision for developing cars that accurately meet the needs of their user base. As a result, past and present Toyota models have been extremely successful, and to this day, Toyota is seen as one of the most innovative car makers in the market. In fact, they’ve won countless awards for their customer-focused innovation.

Amazon

The e-commerce behemoth is a master of customer focus. Amazon pulls all the stops to get into the mind of its customers, understand their current and evolving pain points, and tweak its service accordingly. The company holds as one of its key values an obsession with the customer:

Leaders start with the customer and work backward. They work vigorously to earn and keep customer trust. Although leaders pay attention to competitors, they obsess over customers.

This exactly reflects Jeff Bezos’s declaration at the start of Amazon’s rise, that it would become ‘Earth’s most customer-centric company.’ 

Such a declaration has held true to this day. Amazon has maintained exceptional customer requests & return processes, built features that immerse the customer in the experience and have continued releasing ingenious personalized account recommendations, which keep customers coming back for more. However, this development was only possible because Amazon stuck with its customer-oriented ethos from day one.

Customer focus is unarguably the path to sustainable growth. One way to think about it is through another well-known saying: 

New customers come from the actions of past customers.

If you treat your customers as the most important aspect of your business, they will spend more, stay longer, and help attract new acquisitions. A crucial part of customer orientation is to have your finger on the pulse of user sentiment. This will make sure you always address any issues or changes of need as they come up. We recommend using a tool to track customer sentiment efficiently.
 
Read our guide to find out what we suggest you use to do this.