All about customer focus: What does customer focus deliver?

What does customer-centricity deliver: Lower costs

How much of an organisation's resources with direct customer contact go into fixing what goes wrong elsewhere in the organisation? From our investigations reveals time and again that between 50% and 70% of all calls that take place in a customer contact centre are about issues that could have been avoided. You read that right yes, 50% to 70%. In a nutshell, these are calls that originate in a business process that is not aligned with the customer experience. The customer does not understand something, something is unclear, a mistake has been made. You can avoid a significant part of these conversations by asking your customer, "Dear customer, how could we have avoided this lack of clarity with you?". By doing this on an ongoing basis, you can improve the processes that cause avoidable customer contact based on the input your customers give you.

"But customer contact is valuable, isn't it?". Not always. A conversation in which a customer asks a question about an invoice because he doesn't understand the invoice is not valuable. So if you ask yourself: what does customer-focused working deliver? it lowers your costs, among other things.

Customer-oriented working therefore reduces your costs because you avoid conversations that have no value (turnover, intelligence, feedback). So you can save on your staffing, or you can use your staffing for other things.

Higher customer satisfaction as a result of customer-centricity

At the point when processes are more geared towards positive customer experience customer satisfaction will increase. To pick up on an incorrect invoice, a customer does not like having to call about it either. The moment these things are no longer necessary, a customer will evaluate the service more positively. There are many discussions about the relationship between customer satisfaction and customer loyalty. I think it is very simple: if you are satisfied with the service, you are automatically more likely to remain a customer or buy additional products/services than if you are very dissatisfied.

Differentiation through customer-oriented work

Net promoter score, you know it because it's hot. Do you often tell people at parties that you are so incredibly satisfied with your energy supplier? Do you talk to your acquaintances about the conversation you had with your bank the other day? I don't, at least not when I call about an incorrect bill, communicating a change or the like. However, I do so the moment my expectation is exceeded. If I expect a certain solution before I call and the solution offered is better, I feel that the organisation knows what customers expect and they apply it. After such a conversation, I am more loyal than when I have a conversation about an incorrect invoice. That customer-centric way of working ensures that if I am satisfied and at the time when something similar is discussed in my peer groups I am therefore a promoter.

What does customer-focused working deliver?

1. Being customer-centric means viewing business processes through the eyes of your customers
2. Customer-centricity doesn't have to be so complex at all
3. Customer focus is not just for large companies but also for SMEs/B2B etc.
4. Customer-oriented work is cost-saving
5. Customer-centricity is an important marketing tool