Without a reliable supply of customers, no business can prosper. Given that it’s far easier to persuade existing customers to come back for more than it is to persuade new ones to come in for the first time, it’s a good idea to put customer experience at the heart of everything that you do as a business.
What it Means to Be Customer Centric
To be customer-centric, in short, is to focus all of what you do around your customers and what’s known about them. That means researching thoroughly and acquiring data about your customers and the demographics they represent. This will allow you to focus your marketing efforts that much more precisely.
It will also help to shape the experience that you give to your customers, building a relationship with them that will last for the long-term.
Putting Customers First
So exactly how might we improve the experience for our customers? There are few methods worth exploring.
Your website is the digital front-end of your business and should be given special attention. It should be repeatedly stress-tested to ensure that it can keep up with the technical demands without slowing to a crawl. It should be easy to navigate, with a chatbot feature that will allow customers to get the information they need quickly. Not all customers will use a chat facility ? but knowing that it’s there can provide reassurance to everyone.
Social Media provides a powerful avenue for engaging with customers, finding out what makes them tick, and using them to spread your message.
Finally, pop-up shops are a way to promote yourself in the real world, and test out new products on real customers in real life. For a certain kind of business, such as one selling food, this might be the best possible way to market a product.
Customer Behaviour on your Site
The changes you make to your website should be informed by the way in which customers actually use it. There are several metrics worth paying attention to, here. The bounce rate, or the proportion of visitors who leave the site within a few seconds, is hugely consequential for your traffic from search engines. Other techniques, like alt text, might help to optimise the site’s performance with ranking algorithms.
You might also use membership schemes or loyalty programs to incentivise customers to offer up their information voluntarily, perhaps in exchange for things like exclusive discounts.
