As a business owner or executive looking for ways to empower your organization and fulfill customer needs, you are sure to have come across the concept of a customer-centric strategy.
Why has this term become so popular? Because while all organizations have essential components that can help them excel, an effective customer-centric strategy is key to unlocking their true potential.
By focusing on the wants and needs of your customers, your business can create an environment of mutual value and find creative solutions to accelerate growth.
Start by looking in
When defining the next step in their strategy, businesses tend to begin by looking inwardly and focusing primarily on their strengths. After all, it is crucial to understand your internal business structure, value chain, and marketing efforts, so that these can be tailored and aligned to build upon your pre-existing strengths.
When doing this exploration, take care to identify areas where you have an advantage due to your background, resources, personnel, or achievements and incorporate a plan into your strategy for how best to leverage these attributes in terms of growth and success.
When done effectively, this approach leads to an agile organization capable of responding quickly to changing consumer preferences while meeting long-term aspirations. In essence, taking an inward focus when defining strategy helps ensure that organizations have the right foundations in place for success.
But remember to look out
Crafting a successful business strategy relies on a careful balance of knowing what value you can offer and discovering if that value is desired by your target market. Taking an approach based on focusing on your strengths to generate an offer that is appealing and relevant to the people in your target market can be extremely effective.
It is important to remember, however, that it is only useful when your target market wants what you are offering (or planning to offer); otherwise, with no proven demand the viability and sustainability of the business model can be jeopardized. Therefore, it is essential to prove that desirability exists before anything else.
Mirror, mirror on the wall
Companies often have difficulty assessing their own status objectively, especially in comparison to their competition. There is an inherent bias when business owners and leadership teams evaluate the abilities and offerings of their business relative to others in the space.
It is natural to think that your offer is more impressive, and your team is more experienced, but it is important to remember that every other organisation likely has the same opinion about themselves.
This means that without fully understanding the perception of value by customers or other external prospects (e.g. investors), it can be easy for you to overestimate your worth or underestimate your competitors’.
You must strive for absolute clarity on what constitutes true value from a customer standpoint—this means looking beyond just company size, industry reputation, and claims about product/service advantages. Gathering candid feedback from external stakeholders will help ensure that market-wise decisions are based on a thorough understanding of the competitive landscape.
Structure with the customer in mind
As any successful business will tell you, one of the keys to providing maximum value lies in optimizing your internal structure.
But before you dive into the nitty-gritty details of setting up that structure, it is important to ask yourself if you are really making decisions with your client’s satisfaction as a priority or whether you are constructing a framework that is mainly designed to make your day-to-day operations easier (invoicing processes come to mind here).
A true optimization strategy must involve bringing all customer touchpoints into consideration and seeing how they are reflected in the end result.
A customer-centric strategy requires you to have a thorough understanding of your customer journey and how your company experience is helping them transform to their desired outcomes. Your core processes must be aligned, simplified, communicated, and understood across the entire organization so that all efforts are geared towards creating a positive customer journey from start to finish.
Having a holistic view of your customer value chain you can ensure every step along the way is designed to enable your customers’ transformation end goal. By looking at your business from the lens of the customer value chain and then focusing on creating, communicating, delivering, and supporting an exceptional customer experience through all stages of their journey, you can have an effective customer-centric strategy that delivers high customer satisfaction and sustainable growth.
Putting it all together
Internal optimization is crucial to long-term success and building a customer-centric organization will help you uncover your full potential. It can be easy to underestimate your competitors or overestimate your own value if you do not have a clear understanding of how customers perceive worth.
Seeing the bigger picture and having a holistic view of the customer’s journey will ensure that every touchpoint along the way is designed with their transformation in mind. If done right, taking all these factors into consideration will create a sustainable business model with long-term success.
What steps are you taking to optimize your internal processes and build a more customer-centric business? What actions could you take, or experiments could you try to further validate the desirability of your current or future offer?
Doing this exercise can help give you better clarity on your current approach and provide you with user-generated data to point you into your next growth step with higher confidence.
What is one action you can implement this week as a result of reading this article? Give it a go and let me know how you go!
