Increase Business - Make Your Organisation Customer Focused
 

What do we mean by customer focus? If your service is customer focused the demands of your customers will drive it. It really is time to consider how best to develop a “Customer Focused Organisation”.

Customers

Customers require accurate information to help them make the best decisions about purchases. Customers deem (and quite rightly so in many cases) that they are the centre of the cosmos. Customers vary according to the type of service being used or needed. As proud as you may be of your company and your product or service, most customers only care about how well you can support them to meet their wants and needs. If you don't put your customers at the very centre of everything you do, your business will fail.

Focus

Focused senior executives and business owners spend time with customers, irrespective of size. They always promote and ensure that customer issues are always a key agenda point at any of their board meetings. If you want more of them to buy your services or products, your focus has to be on your customer; avoid being too internally focused. I can assure you that it will take you eye off what is really happening in the market place and will eventually kill your sales.

Business

Looking from a business standpoint, a new approach may be practical. To put a spotlight on the customer can only mean orienting all business processes to customer requirements, which is both common sense and surely the key objective. Good customer focus initiatives and the analysis of key "customer centric" metrics, greatly assists to recognise the business impact of strategic actions.

Trust

This is essential to build a customer centric organisation. Trust-Based Selling shows how trust between consumer and seller is created and illustrates how both sides benefit from it. It’s a win for your business and for the customer.

Information

Information technology is answering these questions with an unprecedented precision about customer-focused ends and means. If a company has a robust quality management system, it is a requirement that a company (using ISO 9001-2000 as an example) shall monitor customer intelligence relating to customer awareness, as to whether the company has met the customer wishes. Always try where possible to get customer opinion. It is often the customer who will not voice their opinion, is the one who walks away to your competitors.

Knowing Your Market Place

Community engagement helps the organisation ensure that the priorities of local people translate into strategy and decision making. Being able to demonstrate customer focus and effective methods of community engagement are a necessary condition of excellence and will support you to achieve recognition for improvement.

Marketing

A customer focused approach affords the opportunity to obtain many results: increase the lifetime value of customers; maintain satisfactory levels of profitability; improve knowledge of customers, and improve the marketing mix. Differentiated marketing can take your business into a new dimension and can gain a great deal by having truly differentiated product/service offers to make. If your business has any volume of web based business, one of your key “focus” tools must be web analytics and dashboards. These tools are extremely beneficial and can offer a business-to-business or business-to-consumer organisation a real picture as to what is happening in their business, what customers are looking at and how long they are looking at it (plus hopefully a successful sale!).

Conclusion

Customer focus increases customer satisfaction while allowing you to compete and thrive in your industry. Sharper customer focus means abandoning the normal trends and practices of the market place and segmenting customers according to how they actually act. At the end of the day it is always key to know that it is usually  down to an excellent leadership team that changes a businesses approach, and it is not just a one off customer focus program, that will truly bring substantial and consistent business rewards.

Nigel Penhearow was a Business Operations Director for a major blue chip company based in the UK. He now holds the position as Category Sales Director. He is a member of various Institutional bodies and has given various speeches in the UK and the USA on business analytics, key performance measurement and best business practice. More information can be found on his web site www.operations-director.com