Focusing on the Customer

By Rene’ Cintron

A customer-centered business focuses all its insights, efforts, and talents on creating and maintaining value for its customers. This means ensuring that every single employee in the organization has a clear and intimate knowledge of what the customer wants, needs, and expects. This knowledge comes through the distribution of information.

Once the goals are clear, and there are plans and strategies, it is time to take action. This is the time to conduct fundamental changes, if necessary, that make a better effort to communicate to employees that in turn deal with the customers. With the importance of communicating with employees and other staff, we must take advantage of the technological advances in communications that companies spent so much time and money improving. These may involve but are not limited to video, email, conferences, blogging, podcasting, and text messaging.

Employees should be involved in the communication process as they are accountable for communication with the customer. Find creative ways to communicate the message. With proper communication methods within the company, the mission and vision of a customer-centered organization can be properly relayed.

As an organization, we should agree on what customer related information is important to the success of the company. A consensus from various stakeholders can come in handy to better understand the needs, wants, and expectations of the customers. It is also important to understand what the employees’ need and want to know about the customers. In addition, we can simply ask the customers directly what they expect, want, and need from us.

Customers should be involved in this process. Your customers are just as anxious to be served, as we are to serve them. I encourage customers to report both complements and complaints in order to better understand their position, thoughts, and feelings about the service. Review performance appraisal processes to include a section evaluating customer service. This will hold the employees accountable for serving that end user customer.

Having a customer-centered strategy is certainly a departure from the traditional approach of sales and marketing. It involves a new organizational mindset and focusing on the customers' wants, needs, and expectations. There is a huge difference between making promises and actually being a customer-centered organization.

Ten Key Components a Customer Centered organization focuses on:
1. Quality customers instead of markets
2. One on one relationships
3. Integrated and coordinated organization
4. Strategic planning and implementation
5. Customer-centered philosophy drive the business
6. Lifetime value instead of short-term sales
7. Information technology
8. New Business metrics and performance measures
9. Dynamic changes in world economy and global businesses
10. A win-win situation

These 10 items are just the start of the customer-centered. These approaches to having the customer in mind will allow the business to focus marketing efforts on the most valuable and most growable customers, build a learning relationship with those quality customers, as well as maximize customer loyalty and retention. The result of this new approach is up and cross selling opportunities and increasing customer lifetime value in profitability.

That's not all; focus on the customer also allows businesses to acquire new quality customers a lot easier than before because now it has been conducting business with its customers properly and effectively. This will also improve the value of delivery methods, achieve cost-savings to the focus of limited resources on quality customers, and establishes customer differentiation and obstacles to competitive entry.

The Golden Rule must apply in all of these situations. Treat customers as you would want to be treated in the same situation. Sometimes it is just that simple. A customer-centered approach does not to mean that the customer is always right. It simply emphasizes an overall company effort to better understand the customer's wants, needs, and expectations.