7 Tips for Increasing Your Company’s Customer Focus

Your company might already have customer-centric measures in place, but if you’re seeing more unhappy customers than satisfied ones, then you need to double down on your business’s customer focus initiatives. With 86% of shoppers willing to pay more to get a great customer experience, it’s crucial now more than ever to level up your customer-focused strategies.

Putting a premium on customer focus helps you zero in on your customers’ needs. This lets you strengthen your marketing, customer support, and sales campaigns. Do this right, and you’ll deliver customer experiences smoother than a fresh jar of Skippy, leading to more happy and loyal consumers.

If you’re dead serious about increasing your company’s customer focus, the tips in this guide can be uber-useful for you.

1. Solve customer issues proactively

Some customer service issues require follow-up contact to resolve. A good example would be customers calling to check the status of their orders.

Instead of your support team saying, “You can call us again if your item doesn’t arrive by the indicated date, and I will find it for you,” a more client-focused approach would be to say, “I’ll track the status of your order and contact you on the delivery date to ensure you get your item on time.”

Following this customer focus example can go a long way to improve your customers’ experience with your brand. Not many companies have a customer support team that proactively contacts customers to ensure their problems are addressed or to prevent any more issues.

Be one of the few companies that proactively reaches out to customers to provide exceptional support; you are bound to nurture more loyal customers.

2. Value clarity

If your customer service agent reassures his/her caller that their problem will be addressed immediately, a timeline needs to be specified. After all, the word “immediately” can mean a lot of things. Your representative could mean the issue will be addressed within the call or within the day, while your customer expects the issue will be resolved in a matter of seconds.

When your customers ended up formulating a different outcome than what you intended to mean, it could cause needless friction. That’s why your customer-facing teams need to convey their ideas clearly and more specifically to avoid setting wrong expectations and to improve customer service.

3. Make your support team accessible

People hate going to great lengths just to reach a live customer service agent. If you’re focusing on the customers and playing your cards right, they shouldn’t have to.

Make your support team easily accessible by offering communication options on your website, social media, mobile, and other channels.

For instance, customer service software, such as Kayako, can make multichannel customer support easy by helping your agents communicate with customers through live chat, email, and social media all from one platform.

Streamline your customer service workflows using software with multichannel support service features and tools. Image source: Author

The software also provides self-service portals and knowledge base, including automated workflows, shared agent inboxes, and omnichannel communications to streamline your customer service delivery.

Also, ensure that you connect conversations across channels. This allows your support team to service customers better and with more context.

4. Use the customer journey to identify gaps

Understand your customer’s behavior better by building a customer journey map. Mapping out the customer journey lets you walk in their shoes and identify their needs at every stage and interaction with your brand.

It also helps you uncover opportunities to improve your customer service focus and determine gaps that keep your company from meeting your customers’ expectations and delivering exemplary experiences.

When you have a vivid picture of the journey your customers go through with your brand, it’s easy to anticipate their needs and concerns. This allows you to add the right materials at the right time and platform.

5. Integrate customer data

Siloed customer data across marketing, sales, customer service, and other departments, can cause process inefficiencies that will harm your customer satisfaction.

For example, customer service teams that don’t have quick and easy access to customer-related marketing data, from customer reviews to buying behaviors, could struggle to address issues promptly. This hinders customer-focused initiatives, potentially hurting your relationship with customers.

Integrate all your customer data and make it accessible throughout your company departments and units. Doing so allows your teams to have a clearer picture of the relationship with your customers, to connect insights, identify the best customer focus software to use, and make data-based decisions to improve the customer experience.

Also, when your support teams are equipped with relevant and impactful customer data, it’s easier for them to upsell relevant products to your customers.

6. Make customers feel heard

While running a customer satisfaction survey or tracking Net Promoter Scores are crucial when listening to your customers, you also need to make them feel heard. One way of doing this is ensuring they won’t need to repeat their issues and information every time they interact with your brand. With a reliable customer service software, this is fairly easy to pull off.

For example, Help Scout makes customer management easy by collecting and providing data needed to provide the best service on every customer conversation. This includes the customer’s contact information, previous orders, and customer histories through third-party software integrations.

Leverage reliable customer data management tools to ensure customers feel heard in every conversation with your brand. Image source: Author

Help Scout software.

By giving your support team quick access to customer data and history, they can start servicing using this information to easily solve any concern.

7. Outline your customer experience strategy

Just as your brand strategy creates and manages customer expectations, your customer experience strategy is your blueprint to meeting or exceeding those expectations.

That is why you need a clear road map of your customer experience. It helps you identify and develop actionable plans to make every customer interaction a pleasant one. This lets you deliver positive and meaningful experiences -- from running a customer appreciation day to personalizing interactions.

Because your customer experience strategy impacts almost every company aspect and initiative, it’s crucial to give it ample thought and planning. Don’t leave everything to chance. Carve out the best possible strategy your company can employ to give your customers the best experience.

For example, in the decision-making phase of the customer journey, you want to make sure your checkout pages or processes are short and straightforward. A lengthy checkout process with multiple calls-to-action can overwhelm and confuse customers, which then ruins their experience.

Start being more customer-centric

Customer focus helps you understand your customers better, allowing you to meet, even exceed, their expectations.

While it takes some elbow grease to nail your company’s customer focus, it’s all worth it. Once you have the mechanisms in place, you’ll have better brand recognition, more loyal customers, and your sales will skyrocket.