Increasing customer focus: five practical tips

Recent market research has shown, not for the first time, that wanting to increase their customer focus is always at the top of the wish list of companies in almost all sectors. Putting the customer at the center of everything you do; it sounds simple, but the experienced entrepreneur will know that it can still be ugly in practice. However, the wish is not crazy: after all, practice shows time and again that companies that perfect their customer focus are the ultimate buyer. But how do you do that, increase your customer focus? We help you on your way with five practical tips.

Tip 1: Work multichannel

Little is more annoying to customers than hearing different stories from different customer entrances. Or hear as an answer to your telephone question that you should have sent an email. It is great if you serve your customers through different channels, but always let them work together and therefore offer total service via each channel. Do not turn your problem into the customer's problem. Ideally, you should not organize your underlying organization separately (per channel), but implementation in each channel is simply part of every project.

Tip 2: Search for your purple crocodile

You know, that one annoyance that you get a complaint from a customer every week. Often you can't do much about it. Maybe it is because of an annoying supplier that you simply need, or because of a faltering piece of software that you cannot ignore. And yet: you have to fix this, rather sooner than later. The moment you accept a purple crocodile in your organization, you accept that you lose the competition.

Bonus tip: most companies have more than one purple crocodile ...

Tip 3: Reward behavior instead of results

The sales department must sell and the service department must solve problems. So we reward sales based on their sales and service based on their handling time. However? Result: customers get products pushed through their throats that they don't need. If they complain about this, they will be served as quickly as possible.

If you still think you can summarize the performance of your company in a few figures and drop it as targets in your departments, you have really missed a few turns. It is great to keep an eye on the results and performance of your company and to act on it, but never count your staff on those figures. Train them in the behavior that you want to see, because you believe that this is customer-oriented behavior. Coach them on it. Make them better. And then look afterwards, quietly for yourself, to see if those figures improve.

Tip 4: Invest in your customer, not in your product

Customers hate the feeling that they are not being taken seriously. That they can only come to bring their money but then can leave again. Invest, therefore, in every phase of your customer relationship, in your customer instead of in your product or in yourself. Get to know your customers, build a personal relationship and let them know that they are appreciated. Do you have many sales agents? Let them all exhibit the same behavior, piece by piece. The gun factor is a factor that you should not underestimate.

Tip 5: Take everyone in your organization with you

Great, all those customer-oriented plans. But ultimately your organization also exists by the grace of the people who work there every day. Make sure they know your vision, want to fight for it and want to work for it day after day. It would not be the first time that excellent policy plans are falling due to uninterested staff failing to implement them. Gather the right people around you and know for sure that, together with you, they want to become the most customer-oriented company in the Netherlands. Only then can you actually make that attempt.