“If you build a great experience, customers tell each other about that. Word of mouth is very powerful” – Jeff Bezos.
Experience – how your consumers feel after using your product/service – is the number one determiner of the future of your business. It crafts the beginning of the “customer-brand” journey. And the way you make your customers feel, indeed, is the fundament of customer value creation. The harsh truth is that your success depends on your customer. Without “customer success,” there is no future for you, no matter what you offer. Even if you are the best telecommunication company, there is no meaning in crafting the value creation process without putting your customer first. Why is that so? Because each time a consumer comes to you, you get ahead in your success path, which means that if no one comes to you, success doesn’t come either. You should always keep customers in the spotlight of the value creation process because every little detail they put into your business, including feedback, helps you create the product/service that will sell better. Again, why? Because that is the product/service, your customer is looking forward to buying. As Maya Angelou mentioned, “I’ve learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.” That is why it is common to note the words of Michael LeBoeuf, “A satisfied customer is the best business strategy of all.” That’s true. Save time, energy, money, and instead of crafting a business strategy, let’s better craft the value for customers, satisfy them, and enable them to establish the best plan for your business.
Marketing Battle to Acquire Customers
Companies always want to put the customer at the heart of their business. Doing it requires excellent knowledge of the target market and the creation of a buyer persona to approach each customer in a personalized way. Terms like “buyer persona,” “personalization,” etc., recently became popular. Before, these were unknown to marketing specialists, and one common approach has always been taken to acquire customers – the mass marketing approach. Today, marketing specialists prefer personalized marketing. Let’s go one by one and see why by comparing these two.
Mass Marketing Approach
The mass marketing approach has always been the primary technique of companies to gain customers. Those companies were content with pushing their products and services on customers through mass marketing. It seemed easy to do and required almost no effort to make the customer know about a particular company’s product and service. What companies did was just concentrate on profit that one significant customer segment brought and ignored niche demographics who were urged to buy the personalized product or service. Those were times when businesses prioritized quantity over quality and the satisfaction level of customers. Frequently, such an approach resulted in the loss of customers, no loyal customer base, and absolutely no consistent value created for customers. Short-term success always came to such companies, but none of those companies was content with it. With time, everyone understood that treating customers this way is the path to failure rather than the key to success.
Personalized Marketing
Today, the ultimate truth is that all customers want and need is to be heard and understood. In other words, customers look forward to feeling that companies put the effort in finding out what their customers want, need, and expect. They get attracted to products and services that have a detail in them describing particular characteristics of a customer segment the company targets. Such a shift in the mindset of consumers pushed companies away from mass marketing and introduced the novel approach called personalized marketing. Companies started focusing on making products and services as personalized as possible to inspire, attract, and maintain customers. Many businesses, even telecommunication equipment suppliers, began making personalized offers to B2B and B2C consumers as they understood that it is the way of making the most out of each deal.
What all companies started doing is crafting a buyer persona – the ideal consumer profile driving all the decisions that companies make regarding the product/service that is about to get to the customer. Marketing specialists create the perfect consumer profile based on market research, close analysis of the target market, actual data of already existing customers, literary evidence, focus groups, interviews, etc. All the techniques that those specialists use bring about characteristics and details about the target market of the company. Eventually, the buyer persona looks like a real customer identical to those probable to make a purchase from that particular company.
How to Initiate Customer Success?
Without knowing what your customer wants to achieve with you, you will never achieve success with your customer. It is crucial to have clear goals that associate with your ideal customer. This will also help you track the development of the process and compare before the goal implementation and after it. However, goals should be applicable. For instance, if we take a telecommunication company as an example, what most companies think they want is cheap VOIP phone services that don’t compromise service quality but cheap isn’t always the answer. Rather, the biggest telecommunication companies in the U.S., i.e., Flagman Telecom, offer affordable yet high-quality VOIP phone services. Knowing this, while providing telecommunication services, these companies ensure the delivery of VOIP phone services at an affordable price with the best quality possible.
Engage with Your Customers
Neither B2B customers nor B2C customers will notify you about the excellence of the product or service you delivered to them. Both types of customers will inform you about the state of the product if and only if your product/service turns out to be below their level of satisfaction. For example, if you own a telecommunication company that works both B2B and B2C, then assuming that VOIP phone service for home and business VOIP phone service works equally great is wrong. Instead, you should survey each of your customers to understand their experience with the product/service you provide. In that way, you will definitely encounter feedback that will improve the product/service you offer and maybe will bring you to the point of providing the best VOIP phone service in the region as a telecommunication company (VOIP phone system for small businesses, VOIP business system, VOIP phone service for home, etc.).
Create Super Experience
You should consider that no matter what the market is, it is always crowded with competitors that are in a rush to implement innovative solutions to maintain customers. Besides, business success heavily depends on how willing the customer is to return to make a purchase next time. That is why creating a superb experience for the customer is of utmost importance. Especially if we talk about companies that provide telecommunication services, consumers have a wide range of options to choose from, and making them feel like they went through a superb buyer journey is crucial for business success. To be capable of creating a superb experience, companies need to actively follow current trends of the industry and implement them according to their product/service type, company culture, buyer persona, etc.
3 Reasons Customer-Centric Businesses Succeed
#1 A loyal customer is a treasure
Gaining loyal customers is a magical skill that is given only to customer-centric businesses. Yes, having loyal customers is magic! For you to understand how valuable a loyal customer is, one loyal customer’s worth is almost eight times more valuable than that of the first-timers. Plus, consider that all you need to do for maintaining loyal customers is take into consideration what they want from you and listen to them; while acquiring new customers costs you money, time, and effort. So, isn’t it better to concentrate on creating value for customers to become one of those successful customer-centric businesses like Flagman Telecom? You can follow the company and see that what they do is provide telecommunication services with the best quality possible to those who need them.
#2 Satisfied customer blocks negative word of mouth
One unsatisfied customer is enough to ruin a brand reputation. Especially in the era of social media, ruining brand reputation is easy as pie. To save your brand from gaining a bad reputation because of unsatisfied customers, you should focus on fulfilling the level of satisfaction in each and every customer. How? Just use personalized marketing and focus on each customer individually. That is when your customer will block negative word of mouth when heard and save you time, money, and effort to either clean or craft a reputation. Maintaining a good reputation is especially crucial to B2B companies. If we take the telecom industry as an example, a top telecom company, Flagman Telecom, always ensures that its customers are satisfied and have nothing to complain about regarding VOIP business phone service. If these people have complaints, telecommunication company representatives listen to them and integrate them into the business operations accordingly.
#3 A valued customer helps you stand out among the competitors
Competition always drains businesses that aren’t well-established and well-positioned in the consumer’s minds. Whenever you let an unsatisfied customer leave your company, at that moment, you gift a new customer to your competitor. This procedure is really quick among telecommunication companies in California. Shifting from one company to another takes one disappointment and a call to a competitor telecommunication company for signing up a new agreement. Not to make your competitors happy and your customers sad, all you need to do is value your customers and show them that you care about them. It can be done by integrating specific characteristics of your buyer persona in brand advertisements, CTAs, personalized emails, etc.; customers should feel that you really work to deliver value for them.
Make sure that your business constantly works towards value creation for each and every consumer. Only then your business will succeed.
