The current hot topic of debate in the world of small business is: does being customer centric play a role in success? Can great customer service alone do the job? Can being customer centric be detrimental?
Every company with a client list relies heavily on their customer service to retain those clients throughout the years.
“It is the provision of service to customers before, during and after the sale of a product or service.”
The question here is whether being customer centric is a beneficial or detrimental strategy for small businesses. The debate is heated, as many believe that becoming customer centric implies that the customer is always right, and that the customer shall be satisfied at any cost.
A small business would most likely suffer in this environment, as budgets are often too tight to accommodate such an approach.
Some have broken customer centricity down into a more streamlined formula that can easily be applied to each customer, in each sale.
1. Awareness and Consideration: Be aware of what the client is looking for and make sure you are offering that, at all stages of the communication.
2. Select and Buy: Streamline your purchasing process to make sure that it is as simple as possible for clients to buy from you.
3. Initial Experience: Prevent buyer’s remorse by actively engaging your clients from the initial buy, inquiring immediately about their level of satisfaction; in other words, nip problems in the bud.
4. Use, Learn and Support: This is the crucial part of customer retention, post sale and follow up – you must continue to nurture the relationship at all times.
5. Repurchase and Recommend: A successful completion of stages 1-4 will ensure you arrive at the last stage where you have engaged your clients into generating new business seamlessly.
We offer customer centricity support tools that include Survey and Feedback features that will encourage your clients to evaluate your services at all stages.
While customer centricity embraces the contested belief that the customer must ‘always be right’, in the long run, its customer retention benefits should not be overlooked as a strategy for small business owners.
Being customer centric is defined as “creating a positive consumer experience at the point of sale, or post sale”. More simply put, it means putting the customer at the center of a company’s marketing efforts, without the main focus being solely on closing the sale.
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