Jeff Bezos, founder and CEO of Amazon.com, once said: ” We had three great ideas on Amazon we have retained for 18 years, and they are the reason why we have been successful: putting the customer first invents and be patient … ” But what means putting the customer first? Or put another way, how can we guide our company to the customer and make this the epicenter of our business? The answer to this question gives us the customer. That is, the key is to “listen to the customer” and for that we can rely on…
External market studies
Market studies expert consultants can always give us the information we need to understand our customer or potential customer and know what they expect from us. In addition, knowledge of the sector in which we operate is essential for trends to guide us where we should go.
Internal studies
Our CRM is a valuable source of information. In it we can analyze the behavior and evolution of our customers regarding our products or services.
Take your Customer Complaints
Bill Gates said: “Your most angry customers are your greatest source of learning and better.” And indeed, the customer complaints reveal the weaknesses of our company and improvements needed points.
Social networks
In social networks we interact directly with our target, which makes us know them and they know us better. We can take advantage of these to see if we are reaching our target audience or whether on the contrary, we were unable to connect to it.
Not all customers are equal
Segmenting our customers according to their needs and expectations will help us more personalized service tailored to company and what they expect from our brand. Also our marketing and communication must be adapted according to the target we want to reach.
It Involves All Workers
We should note that customer focus should not only be of those departments that are in closer contact to the customer, such as sales or marketing. Today in the company must be aware that ultimately, it is the customer who pays our payroll.
Get the whole company is oriented to the client when we are able to involve all workers in a common goal: to reach the customer. It is therefore very important to keep close to all staff day to day business. And this will succeed internally reporting on cases of successes, marketing and communication campaigns launched and what we intend with these, how our products or services can help customers, etc. In short, we all know the goals achieved as a company, we want to achieve and how we will do it.
Internal communication is very important. If we want all staff to be involved should give us the first step, by involving all workers in a common enterprise project.
Interpret Information
As we have seen, we can drink from different sources to obtain the information necessary to meet our customer but once we get this, we need to know how to interpret.
We are in an election year and it is a rare day that did not eat breakfast to a new survey of voting intentions of citizens, promoted by some media, the CIS or statements of a politician on survey data that the political parties themselves handle. We have found that the same survey can give us two different graphics. One, which shows the result of the survey in “raw” and another which reflects the same data after “cooking” or what is the same, after interpreting them.
That is exactly what we should do business with the information we collect from customers: we must know “cook”. Therein lies the key to success, as will those companies that know how to interpret the data, they will get reach the customer. Henry Ford said, “If I had asked my customers what they needed, they would have said it better horse.”