- By: Mark Jakobsen
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Listening to your customers makes business sense
Where would we be without customers? Customers are great, good customers are fantastic, and fantastic customers are legendary. But for us to have those legendary customers we need to listen to them. Something a lot of companies fail to do.
Why are we talking about such a simple and basic thing? Because listening to your customers has so much potential for your business. We often talk about the importance of having your customers, not you, at the centre of your business to ensure future success, and the simplest way to achieve this is to foster those relationships.
Fostering your relationship
A strong relationship with your customer will mean a higher retention rate. And I would like to remind you that retaining a customer is cheaper than finding a new one. How much cheaper will depend upon the industry you are in and how your company is set up, but it can range anywhere from 5 times to 25 times more expensive to acquire a new customer.
So from a purely financial point of view, it makes sense, right?
It goes beyond finance, and into success
It’s simple really, successful businesses deliver the right products and services their customer base needs. Your customer base tells you that your products or services are needed, but what you may not know is how good a fit they are, especially when compared to a competitor.
Actively engaging in meaningful conversations with your customers allows you to sanity-check the products and services you are providing. Through these conversations, you can gain a wealth of information to help shape its success. This information essentially breaks down into two camps, being:
- Information to help product development
You can gain valuable insight into how the customer uses your product or service. You may be able to start grouping customers together into clusters based on how they engage. On top of that, with the right communication, you can extract what they would like to see developed as part of the offering.
Feeding this information back to your product team will help them to ensure the product is developed to your customer requirements, making it easier to retain your customers and sell them to new ones.
- Information to help understand market trends
Your customers are a treasure trove of market trends information. Collectively, they can tell you how the market is adapting to new technologies, new players, or external forces. They can also uncover changing preferences which may lead to emerging opportunities to play in.
Changing to a customer-centric decision-making model
Collecting and placing the above information at the core of what you do is the first step to becoming a customer-centric business. It doesn’t matter how you achieve it, whether it’s through consistent account manager touchpoints, surveys, focus groups or beta testing, it’s about getting the right information into your company to allow all your teams to make informed decisions that have the customer at the centre.
If this seems daunting, it doesn’t need to be. There are simple steps you can take to start along this journey. For example, when Salesforce wanted to align their product development with their customers, they created IdeaExchange. IdeaExchange allows their customers to submit ideas, and vote on others, on how they would like to see Salesforce developed. Once an idea generates either 250 votes or 2,500 points the idea is forwarded to the product development team for evaluation.
Has that shed any new light?
You and your customer should have a relationship that you both cherish and like any relationship, it will take time and effort to build. For the most part, the effort needs to come from you. They are the customer after all.
How you set it up will depend on a variety of factors, including what industry you are in, who your customers are, and what resources you have to hand initially. But once set up it is imperative you have the structure in-house to share the captured information with all the relevant departments so your company can truly benefit from its impact.
If you would like to know more and understand how you can set yourself up correctly for generating and using customer information drop us a line.