Customer focus is the company's ability to generate an additional flow of customers, as well as additional profit, providing a deep understanding, as well as meeting the basic needs of customers.
What is it?
The idea behind this definition is quite simple. That is, customer focus is the orientation of the company to a specific group of consumers and, therefore, the most efficient satisfaction of their needs. This concept is used, first of all, in order to describe the activities of various commercial companies that try to ensure an extremely stable flow of customers, as well as maximum profit from their business.
What should she be like?
Customer focus is one of the most important elements of any business, and the main effect of it should be an increase in profits during the work of the company. If it is not possible to provide additional profit by investing more resources in improving the quality of the service provided, then in this case there is no customer focus itself, but managers often forget about it.
Misconception in this matter ultimately leads to the fact that companies begin to allocate absolutely unjustified costs and even begin to harm their own business, because they use financial and human resources for other purposes, distracting them from more important goals.
An example is the free delivery that the majority of companies offer. In this case, customer focus is the provision of greater convenience and comfort for consumers, especially when it comes to prompt delivery. But at the same time there is a question about whether the free delivery really will fully satisfy any important needs from customers? Perhaps buyers will want to be delivered goods, and the opportunity to save a small amount on delivery is not important for them. In this case, the company simply bears extra losses.
Why is a high-quality service not a sign of customer focus?
In fact, everything is extremely simple. You can achieve an extremely high quality service, which will be brought to full automation, and hope to attract customers that you really will not notice. In fact, in this case, service standards are set as priorities, such as speed, repeatability, accuracy, performance, that is, traditional conveyor parameters, however, you should understand that you are not achieving a good customer experience or some kind of extraordinary the pleasure of working with your company. If we are talking about big business, then in this case, the conveyor system offers to build customers in a long queue.
In fact, far from all cases, the conveyor service, which is characterized by extremely high productivity, can provide you with effective customer acquisition. If an individual approach is required, many large companies continue to formally appeal to customers, while they experience a high need for an individual service. It is here that small businesses get more opportunities in industries that do not require free services such as delivery at the expense of the company.Today, customers expect high service, for which they really can and are willing to pay.
What is the advantage?
It is worth noting several advantages that provide staff with customer focus:
- Ultimately, the client remains as satisfied and even possibly admired as the ideal service of your company, as a result of which he will recommend your services or the products you offer.
- A satisfied customer will subsequently buy much more often, and more importantly, more.
- The most satisfied customer is willing to pay more over time, but you should be careful here, as there are reasonable limits.
Among other things, it is worth noting the fact that loyal customers begin to share any useful information with your company, provide assistance in improving the product or the service you offer, and also optimize business processes. Thus, you can ultimately increase the value of the product you are offering.
How to make your company attractive?
First of all, the principles of customer focus include attention to the needs of each client, as well as the desire to completely get rid of any problems that he may encounter when working with you. In addition, you must understand the assessment of customer profitability, as well as provide him with a level of service that will correspond to this profitability.
It is worth noting that internal customer focus is far from being easily brought into an existing company, because it will be necessary to completely change the structure of relations, the already familiar culture, as well as the technologies used. However, if there is a desire and a necessary share of perseverance, by a consistent movement towards your customers, you can eventually achieve noticeable results, and here you need to provide a systematic approach in order to organize the processes for servicing each category of customers.
If any changes occur in working companies, there is a big risk that, in trying to realize customer focus, companies will make certain mistakes. First of all, these errors will be noticed by customers, as a result of which the system can negatively affect those sales that you already have. In order to minimize or even completely eliminate the possibility of such errors, it is recommended that conversions be introduced into the work of the company gradually.
Phased Changes
There are levels of customer focus on which the company moves:
- Development of quality service.
- Maintaining the level of professional service.
- Work as a customer service center.
While the assessment of customer focus is still not high, and the company has reached an acceptable quality of service, you should not immediately jump over one or even two steps, since everything must be done in a timely manner. First of all, the people working in the company should change, as well as their understanding of the service, their attitude to each other and, naturally, to the customers they serve.
How does this happen?
All of the above actions are done with the development of quality service, that is, when customer orientation just begins to develop. Examples of further development can be represented as follows:
- Top management must fully believe that the company will be able to provide an individual approach to each individual client, as well as provide them with high quality service.
- It is necessary to ensure the necessary amount of funds in order to ensure professional development and subsequent implementation of the service development strategy.
- The service begins to improve so much that it becomes obvious to customers and, therefore, they believe that the quality of the product has also increased.In this case, you will be able to help the current standards of service culture, as well as regulating the work of all employees of your company.
- It often happens that a company neglects the need to train its employees in basic customer service technologies, although their profit depends more on the correctness of this approach than on all other efforts.
- Then, an understanding of the “internal client” in the company is ensured, that is, different departments should help each other, and not try to stand out from everyone else.
- Each employee should be aware of the fact that his work completely affects how the customer perceives the quality of the service provided to him, as well as the quality of the product offered, and it does not matter how far this employee is from the “line of direct communication with consumers” .
What are the differences between quality and professional service?
Professional service, as well as the formation of an appropriate mentality of employees in the training process, can significantly increase the trust of the company's customers, as well as provide confidence in its marketing tools. Resources, which in this case are invested in advertising and marketing, are not wasted just because employees are not professional enough.
In other words, increasing customer focus provides a significant increase in customer confidence in both the company itself and the marketing tools it uses.
How to transfer a company to a professional level?
To achieve this result, you will need to implement a system of total employee training, as well as learn from the experience of successful use of knowledge by each individual employee of the company. Service professionals are not born people.
Often, these days, business spends too little time providing decent training, as well as motivating first-line employees to work as efficiently as possible. A professional is a person who works extremely hard and also tries to achieve excellence. Such a specialist is defined in the details, because professionalism requires a long experience, while thoughtful and competent work that provides a vision of the details, and also allows as much as possible to satisfy the needs and demands of consumers.
What are the differences between professional and amateur?
First of all, we are talking about those values that guide the person working in the company and its customers. In addition, a professional is determined by the level of training in the skills of high-quality service, as well as by how much he is ready to use these skills and knowledge in his work every day. Thus, in the overwhelming majority of cases, companies cannot even think about ultimately moving to the last level when work is carried out at the level of a customer service center.
Modern realities
As mentioned above, changes in an already operating, and even more so for a long time working company is like a living operation, which is difficult and fraught with serious consequences. Often a company cannot increase the quality of service, as a result of which, in the overwhelming majority of cases, the limit is the second stage, that is, professional service.
How to achieve the highest level?
In order to achieve an extremely high level of service, you need to form an organization, its structures, standards, teams, as well as buildings and premises from scratch.
In the “service center”, the efforts of each individual service and any employee are aimed at achieving the ideal quality of service, which does not even provide for a slight dissatisfaction on the part of customers.The main criterion for an ideal service is a combination of convenience and speed for customers. For modern people, the rhythm of life has increased significantly, so saving time provides more opportunities in order to achieve some personal goals. Today, every person appreciates just that.
However, this is far from affordable for all companies, and only a few were originally built in such a way as to take into account even the slightest vagaries of each category of its customers.
