How to Create a Customer Strategy

Do you know how to create a customer strategy? You might not be familiar with the terms, let us clear this topic of customer strategy and tell you the importance in your business.

Today, business organizations are struggling to survive in a highly uncertain business world. They are looking for ways to be more creative, innovative, and competitive. Different factors affect the performance of the firms. One of the factors that have been suggested to influence firms’ performance is the ‘customer focus. Slogans such as “The customer comes first” or “The customer is king” are quite common in the business world.  These slogans are used to emphasize the role of the customer to the stakeholders such as owners and employees of a service firm.

In today’s competitive business environment, customer satisfaction is an increasingly important component of an effective organization and has been recognized as an important part of corporate strategy. Hence, Customer satisfaction has been a key driver of firms’ long-term profitability and market value. Staying close to one’s customers can result in timely market information, joint product development activities, and intense brand loyalties, leading to better financial performance. The importance of customer loyalty as a means to achieve long-term competitive advantages in the context of competitive global markets.

The extent to which the business firm can satisfy its customers is an indication of its general health and its prospects for the future; it has a direct long-term impact on the future performance of the firm.

Keep in mind that a successful customer service strategy is a result of focusing on customer happiness.

Virtually all of us would agree on the importance of customer-centricity and a robust customer strategy. A well-designed customer approach strategy improves lead generation, acquisition, cross-selling, and retention rates by delivering differentiated experiences consistently across all customer touchpoints.

But there are different opinions and aspects as to customer strategy examples and its types. The next step to customer strategy is how to create a customer experience strategy for a good customer satisfaction. To complete a proper customer strategy, it could be segmentation, customer experience strategy, media strategy, offer strategy, brand communication strategy, or any combination of these. While none of these terms are incorrect, individually they only provide a partial definition.

The idea of a customer is also known as the need for traffic to your portal online and this goes a long way to show that the need for customer feedback is very important. The question of how to create a customer strategy varies based on the form of a business model that is operated, it could be a one-man business, e-commerce, public cooperation, and possibly a fortune 500 firm as the case may be. Hence customer strategy is cannot be ignored, it’s just that it can only vary based on the organizational goal that is set.

A customer strategy can either be to get new customers or to retain old customers and I guess that it will not be to reduce the number of customers since everyone, or better said every business needs tons and tons of customers coming in daily.

A customer service strategy helps businesses with: Customer Satisfaction – plays a vital role in understanding your customer needs and building customer satisfaction. Increased Loyalty – making customers happy and driving recurring business. In a nutshell, there are various customer strategies which include: making customer happiness the end goal across the company, identifying all customer touchpoints, setting goals for customer service, identifying customer service KPIs to monitor, building a driven customer service team, building a powerful customer service toolkit, to give your customer service representatives power, to create a consistent feedback loop, etc.

Setting goals for customer service

Here’s what SMART goals look like for your service team:

Define specific goals instead of vague aspirations: Make each goal focus on one area only

Make goals challenging enough so you can keep growing, but attainable with work and targeted effort

Ensure your customer service goals directly correlate with your business objectives

Know how you’ll measure your goals and within which timeframe

Finally, the best customer service reps focus on customer contacts. They feel empowered and supported to do right by the customer. Make this approach the background of all customer service goals you set.

Identify customer service KPIs to monitor

With your goals in place, you must then define KPIs to track and improve. Without them, you can’t turn your goals into action plans. KPIs, or Key Performance Indicators, provide an instant look into how well your customer service is doing.

Here is a guide to the customer service KPIs you’ll want to choose from:

•           Customer satisfaction score (CSAT), for overall customer happiness

•           Net promoter score (NPS), for the power of your referrals

•           First response time, to measure the time your customers are on hold

•           First contact resolution, to estimate how many customers have to talk to you more than once to get a solution

•           Average resolution time

•           Active issues

•           Resolved issues

•           Number of issues, to track the number and nature of issues over time

•           Customer retention rate

Another example is improving the average resolution time. Let’s say your team successfully reduces the time it takes to close an issue. As a result, however, they start handling issues poorly. This can reduce customer satisfaction and many other crucial metrics.

In other words, make sure you don’t look at your KPIs in a vacuum.

Overview of Customer Segmentation

We have now known a proper steps on how to create a customer strategy? Now we need long lasting relationship with our customers. Customer segmentation is the know our customer deeply with their behavior and actions.

Customer segmentation is the process by which you divide your customers up based on common characteristics – such as demographics or behaviors, so you can market to those customers more effectively. These customer segmentation groups can also be used to begin discussions about building a marketing persona.

The most common types of customer segmentation are Demographic Segmentation – based on gender, age, occupation, marital status, income, etc. Geographic Segmentation – based on country, state, or city of residence. Local businesses may even segment by specific towns or counties.

Know Your Audience

Knowing your audience involves understanding others, and their perspectives, to see if they understand your words, examples, or the frames of reference you use to communicate your experiences, points, and conclusions. Ask yourself when you last had a miscommunication with someone.

Sun Tzu said, “if you know your audience and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred emails.

Knowing your audience makes you better able to connect with them. It means that you know enough about their values, backgrounds, and beliefs to understand what matters to them. The more you learn about your audience, the better you can plan communication.

Understanding your audience provides insights into unmet needs, as well as a thorough knowledge of the environment in which a product is sold. This allows a business to better develop its product/service offering and selling strategy to meet its audience’s demands.

Customer Needs

Whether you’re a new entrepreneur, an established business owner, or an employee within a company, your success is often measured by how well you convince potential customers to purchase your product or service.

Achieving this requires understanding your business’s market and competition, its differentiating factors and value proposition, and, most importantly, your ideal buyer. Specifically, you need to know the motivations, goals, challenges, and desires that lead them to purchase a solution like yours.

It’s useful to think about this concept in terms of customer “needs.” What does a potential customer need that leads them to your solution? Understanding that need can enable you to not only tailor your sales and marketing messaging, but inform your product research and development, customer service, and other aspects of your business.

A customer need is a need that motivates a customer to purchase a product or service. The need can be known (i.e., the customer can put it into words) or unknown, and is the ultimate factor that determines which solution the customer purchases.

Customer needs can be broken out into many different varieties and categories. For example, a customer might need a solution that has specific functionality, falls within a set budget, or provides a certain level of reliability.

Eventually, all customer needs can be categorized into three main types: functional, social, and emotional needs.

Business Goals

Business goals define the “what” of a business’s purpose whereas business objectives define the “how.” Business goals typically only provide a general direction that a company will follow whereas business objectives clearly outline actionable steps.

These may include any of the following or more:

•           Increase your product or service’s market share. …

•           Provide opportunities for teams to improve their leadership skills. …

•           Reduce employee turnover and increase satisfaction. …

•           Reach out to more community members. …

•           Maintain or increase profits. …

•           Strengthen customer service.

Every business is guided by five main objectives which include:

•           Survival.

•           Profit.

•           Provision of a service.

•           Social responsibility.

•           Customer satisfaction.

•           Market share.

•           Enterprise

Don’t forget that the SMART in SMART goals stands for Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-Bound. Defining these parameters as they pertain to your goal helps ensure that your objectives are attainable within a certain time frame.

Common Goals

Having a strong clientele and a motivated, competent team is a solid foundation for a business, but for a business to grow, it’s important to have clear objectives. When you set business objectives, you demonstrate your commitment to developing a company in specific ways. If you serve in a leadership role, it’s important to set objectives for your team to give them clear goals and areas of improvement to work on.

A business objective is a measurable result an organization is aiming to accomplish. Many business professionals form objectives using the SMART goal method, which stands for specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-based.

As the organization grows, it’s important to regularly form new business objectives to effectively track employees’ performance and ensure the business is progressing and improving.

Business objectives are also a great way for you and your team members’ employees to identify your strengths and areas of improvement. Once you determine these, you can implement new strategies to help enhance your performance, which contributes to improving the organization’s efficiencies overall.

Creating a strong business objective is important for your organization because it:

•           Keeps employees focused on growth

•           Strengthens key elements of the business

•           Motivates you and/or team toward a goal

•           Helps structure tasks and responsibilities

•           Can increase your market share

•           Drives team cooperation and collaboration

•           Builds better working relationships

•           Can promote better cost control and budgeting

The hierarchy of Business Goals. When building a business, you should concentrate on a different hierarchy: Survive. Sustain. Profit.

 

Key Performance Indicators (KPIs)

Key performance indicators (KPI) gauge a company’s output against a set of targets, objectives, or industry peers.

Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) are a special set of metrics that help determine whether a business is going in the right or wrong direction. At first glance, it seems that customer service KPI scores take a backseat to traditional business KPIs, like profits, costs, and regional scales.

Also referred to as key success indicators (KSIs), KPIs vary between companies and between industries, depending on performance criteria.

For example, a software company striving to attain the fastest growth in its industry may consider year-over-year (YOY) revenue growth, as its chief performance indicator. Contrarily, a retail chain might place more value on same-store sales, as the best KPI metric in which to gauge its growth.

KPIs vary from business to business. But in general, five of the most commonly used KPIs include:

•           Revenue growth

•           Revenue per client

•           Profit margin

•           Client retention rate

•           Customer satisfaction

To Measure KPIs?: It depends on the actual KPI being measured. But generally speaking, businesses measure and track KPIs through business analytics software and reporting tools.

A good KPI has the following attributes:

•           Provides objective and clear information of progress towards an end-goal

•           Tracks and measures factors such as efficiency, quality, timeliness, and performance

•           Provides a way to measure performance over time

•           Helps make more informed decisions

Conclusion

So, how do I give the best customer service experience?

You might get some idea and points on how to create a customer strategy

There’s no one-size-fits-all solution when it comes to extraordinary customer service.

But there is a surefire way to create a customer service process that makes your customers feel like you have their back.

To achieve this, remember to:

•           Instill the focus on customer service throughout your company and into all teams

•           Map out the full customer journey so you can level up every possible touchpoint

•           Set meaningful goals and KPIs for your customer service team

•           Hire the right people and give them the tools and authority to serve your customers well

•           Always collect feedback and implement changes based on it

•           And just like that, customer service is no longer a burden or an afterthought. Instead, it becomes the fuel behind your company’s long-term success!

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