Blog post

The 3 pillars for every winning customer-obsessed strategy

With customers being the cog of an organisation’s success, having a customer-obsessed outlook can provide your organisation with a competitive advantage.

Learn how to have a winning customer-obsessed strategy.

In this blog, we outline what it means to be customer-obsessed, it’s importance and 3 tips to get you started on the customer-obsessed journey.

What does it mean to be customer-obsessed?

Customer obsession means constantly listening to your customers and then continuously testing, enhancing and personalising the customer experience.

It’s an outside-in approach that enables your organisation to utilise data-driven insights. It also provides opportunities to increase your customer lifetime value as their needs and pain points are better understood. All these factors enhance the opportunity to provide quality and meaningful experiences.

Observing through the customer lens is key to succeed in today’s competitive landscape. As an organisation, prioritising customers at all stages of their purchasing journey is pivotal in retaining their loyalty. Improving the overall customer experience such as incorporating new technologies into your ecosystem can lead to your customers promoting your organisation for you.

Are you a customer-centric or a customer-obsessed organisation?

First things first, let’s understand the difference between a customer-centric organisation and a customer-obsessed one. Customer-centric organisations often focus on customer acquisition and experiment with methods to make acquisition faster, cheaper, and more effective. Customer-obsessed organisations focus more on customer retention, increasing satisfaction and loyalty with the objective to increase customer lifetime value.

According to Gartner, customer-centric organisations often act reactively when customers reach out to the company with needs or pain points. Comparatively, customer-obsessed organisations act proactively to prevent customers from experiencing pain points or gaps in their experience.

Without developing the right strategy, processes, and data insights to adequately serve target audiences, there is a risk of falling behind your competitors, and potentially creating campaigns that are inefficient. This could have a negative impact on your marketing ROI.

3 pillars for every winning customer-obsessed strategy

1. Get to know your customers through data

Collecting data about your customer is not enough on it’s own. Captured data must include relevant information such as their demographics, buying habits and activity status. This allows effective analysis and insights to provide suitable (and improved) business decisions to be made.

As an organisation, take the time to listen to your customers, invest in people, tools and programs to collect feedback and translate it into meaningful insights. Understanding customer experiences from various touch points can help empower your organisation to provide a better experience and promote customer loyalty.

2. Understand the customer journey

To be customer obsessed, a seamless customer experience is imperative. To achieve this, the customer journey should be understood as it can provide a full view of how your organisation interacts with your customers as well as provide insight into how your brand is perceived.  Having alignment across various departments of your organisation i.e sales, marketing etc. enables the customer journey to be mapped out correctly and ensures the customer experience is positive.

3. Anticipating customer needs

Using the customer data that has already been collected, you can drill down further and use this data as a way to predict and anticipate your customer’s buying habits for future interactions with them. Additionally, having insight into their preferred communication channel can be valuable to grab their attention on new products or services that may become available.

Ensure to use collected data effectively. Collected data can give awareness into customer trends and provide an indication into additional services that could be beneficial for their success (as well as yours). 

Customers are open to trying new things, allowing the freedom to trial, experiment and arrange more impactful engagements. Anticipating your customer’s needs is the formula for building and strengthening customer relationships.

As today’s customers are more empowered than ever, it means organisations servicing these customers must be equally empowered. If your organisation is properly aligned with your customers, you not only understand what the customer is doing but also the why.  

Knowing your customers means understanding what’s going on in their world and proactively help them navigate the media environment. 

If you would like to learn more about gathering media data and insights or anything media intelligence related, get in touch with us today.