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Tag: customer centricity

  • Is the Customer Always Right? How to Understand Customer-Centric Thinking to Drive Engagement | Entrepreneur

    Is the Customer Always Right? How to Understand Customer-Centric Thinking to Drive Engagement | Entrepreneur

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    Opinions expressed by Entrepreneur contributors are their own.

    Imagine a world where mattresses aren’t just about sleep but are associated with beauty, stress relief and overall well-being, where millions of data points can predict when the “next big thing” is right around the corner. This is the world today, driven by ever-evolving consumer preferences, where companies strive to stay ahead by honing their customer-centric strategies.

    Achieving business success means going beyond what customers say they want and digging into why they want it. This often reveals a gap between their words and actions. Businesses tend to make products based on guesses about what customers want, both from what they say and what’s assumed. However, customers might struggle to express their needs clearly, and what they claim to prefer might not match what they’re ready to spend on. Closing this gap between talk and action is the key to genuine customer-centricity.

    For years, Treacy & Company by Cherry Bekaert has been exploring consumer centricity through work with our clients. Our recent interactions with innovators have inspired us to share our latest thinking. In this article, we will delve into the importance of uncovering deeper customer meaning and AI’s role in helping to accelerate this customer discovery process.

    Related: 10 Ways to Keep Making Your Clients Happier and Happier

    The gap in customer-centricity

    Amid the intricate landscape of consumer dynamics, a crucial gap often emerges between what customers vocalize and what they truly prioritize. Companies frequently design products based on their assumptions or direct customer feedback, which overlooks a vital reality. Customers’ explicit desires may only sometimes reflect their true preferences or willingness to purchase a product.

    Take the instance of sustainability; even though customers might stress their preference for eco-friendly options when faced with the prospect of paying more for such alternatives, a majority opt for convenience and affordability. This gap between words and actions is a pivotal point for companies to refine their customer-centric approach. It’s where they can reshape strategies to truly meet customers’ deeper motivations and bridge the divide between what’s said and what’s done.

    Unveiling the deeper meaning

    Human discussions and trends often carry a hidden depth beyond the surface. We are much more than our surface-level desires or expressed preferences. Consider the unassuming mattress — an everyday item that carries a remarkable weight of association. When thinking about mattresses, people often associate them with the “culture of sleep” (per MotivBase). In reality, customers implicitly instill mattresses with a broader meaning, encompassing beauty, stress relief and overall well-being.

    Casper, a prominent player in the mattress industry, embraced this profound insight and launched their 2022 campaign, “This is where dreams begin.” This initiative was fueled by a recognition that customers’ authentic desires often reach beyond explicit preferences or assumptions. By tapping into these true motivations, Casper aimed to establish connections that resonate with customers on a fundamental level. This strategic shift acknowledges that customers seek more than just functional products — they yearn for solutions that align with their deeper aspirations.

    There is untapped potential for companies to not only provide products but also offer holistic experiences that cater to customers’ deeper emotions, forging lasting bonds of loyalty and satisfaction.

    Related: What The Fastest-Growing Companies Have In Common

    Transforming insights into actionable strategies

    By analyzing long-form text from social/search channels and applying an anthropological lens, AI can play a pivotal role in helping uncover the hidden motivations and behaviors that shape customer preferences. From first-hand experience with our customers, we are finding that consumer behavior studies that once took ethnographers months to complete can now be done in weeks or even days.

    For example, for a leading consumer brand’s cleaning division, we recommended a sensing AI tool that could uncover opportunities to fill the R&D pipeline. By sensing millions of data points using search, social and new product data, we identified the emerging, maturing and declining trends related to the cleaning category by analyzing growth and size.

    Related: How AI Can Turbocharge Innovation and Help Destroy Your Competition

    This approach uncovered not only expected trends but also unexpected shifts. Instead of listening to a focus group of customers and sorting through reviews, the team could now better understand the true trends of the masses. These millions of consumer engagements led the team to find surprising and unfamiliar trends popping up in the category, which they were able to capitalize on by better prioritizing their R&D roadmap.

    These stories offer a fresh way to see the old saying, “The customer is always right.” It’s not just a rule anymore; it’s about exploring why customers want what they want. Customer-centricity means bridging the gap between words and actions, digging into the reasons behind surface desires and using AI to make smarter decisions. In a changing consumer landscape, those who understand this approach will be skilled at meaningful engagement and gain a strong competitive edge, shaping an environment where every customer interaction resonates deeply.

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    Francesco Fazio

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  • 3 Methods to Unlock the Mindset You Need for More Success | Entrepreneur

    3 Methods to Unlock the Mindset You Need for More Success | Entrepreneur

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    Opinions expressed by Entrepreneur contributors are their own.

    Recently, I sat down with a fellow entrepreneur to talk about his business. I asked what experiences I could share that would help him. He answered almost immediately: “I am struggling with getting my team to focus less on themselves and more on our customers and their needs.”

    Specifically, he shared that many of his team’s meetings have nothing to do with the customer but instead are centered around the company, its people or policies. For example, deciding whether to create a nap room or provide pet maternity leave. Because he is in a creative field and we live in feel-good Portland, Oregon, my guess is that he has a bit of a headwind trying to guide his team to think less about employee perks and more about serving their customers.

    I do have experience to share about fostering a customer-centric mindset.

    I am a year and a half into building my third company. Over time, the companies my team and I build have evolved to become more and more customer-centric — and are experiencing greater and greater success largely because of that. This third company has the highest customer satisfaction ratings we have ever received.

    We produced these results using three methods that promote a customer-centric mindset. The combination of the three essentially hard-codes the customer as the priority.

    Related: 3 Ways to Build a Customer-Centric Company Culture

    1. Create customer-oriented core values

    When I looked at my friend’s five core values, none even remotely involved the customer. They all focused on the types of people working there and their behavior mindsets mainly toward each other.

    Two of our four core values are around customer service (“We Care” and “We Inspire 5-Star Reviews”). Customers see these show up in different ways, which helps us stand out compared to other companies. At team meetings, we often recognize examples of these two values, and all team members are rated on how they represent these values during their annual performance review.

    It is a leader’s responsibility to ensure that the customer’s viewpoint is part of your core values discussion.

    When we started the company, we held off-site meetings so the team could brainstorm our core values. While it is common practice during this exercise to identify what the best team members have in common and pick those as core values, it is also critical to consider the top three deliverables that customers value most and that make the company stand out from competitors. Then, identify specific, action-oriented core values that can deliver at the level required to achieve the vision and growth you outlined.

    Though reworking core values can be very difficult, a values redux where as many as half of them focus on the customer or the types of characteristics that serve your customer best is key to enhancing company performance. Because core values function as your company’s DNA, this hardwires customer-oriented behaviors.

    2. Walk in the customer’s shoes

    What processes or experiences would help team members understand your customer’s unique journey and therefore improve it? New team members have a fresh perspective that can provide value to your company. It’s up to you to leverage that.

    We require new team members to blind-shop competitors — just like a new customer would. They complete a questionnaire about each competitor. During their orientation, I ask them to compare what they saw and experienced at our store versus competitors’ stores.

    This not only enables them to experience being a customer of our product but also empowers them to use what they learned to help sell to our customers, having literally walked in their shoes.

    Related: How to Become a More Customer-Centric Business in 5 Steps

    3. Tie compensation to customer satisfaction

    Another powerful way to inspire customer-centricity is to encourage it through compensation. There are many different compensation structures to achieve this.

    In our company, front-line team members are compensated in a number of ways. About 20% of their ongoing monetary compensation comes from a bonus pool tied to customer satisfaction. Their bonus percentage is calculated from the number of five-star reviews received and the percentage of promoters from our customer service survey.

    Additionally, these satisfaction measures, combined with their annual review core values ratings, are utilized to determine their annual company profit-sharing allocation. There is no substitute for the power of this direct connection to happy customers. The happier our customers are, the more money front-line team members make.

    Balance the seesaw

    When you created your company, did you do it solely to make employees happy? Probably not. More likely, you saw a need or problem and wanted to solve it to improve your customers’ lives.

    That said, a great work environment and strong company culture are important, too. After all, superior customer satisfaction can’t be delivered unless your employees are happy — the two concepts are not mutually exclusive.

    The connection between employee happiness and customer satisfaction is like a seesaw, requiring a delicate balance that each business leader must achieve on their own terms. As you calibrate where the weight will sit, remember that without happy customers, the company won’t survive very long.

    A customer-centric perspective is key to long-term success, which enables the opportunity for ongoing employee satisfaction. When you empower employees to connect those two concepts through core values, walking in the customer’s shoes and compensation tied to customer satisfaction, you’ve implemented a trifecta of winning strategies that should hard-code your company to find its ideal equilibrium and thrive for decades.

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    Barry Raber

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