The Leverage: If you want to drive business and revenue growth, be Customer Obsessed
We are in a peculiar time and therefore businesses need to do peculiar things to stay alive — and thrive. The saying that desperate times call for desperate measures is very useful now.
The YC’s email, a few days back, to founders was filled with the advice on how they should structure and function in these interesting times.
One of the pieces of advice;
Regardless of your ability to fundraise, it’s your responsibility to ensure your company will survive if you cannot raise money for the next 24 months.
To Survive, Be Customer Obsessed.
As a business, part of your strategy to survive, thrive and grow is to leverage your customers — delight them. Do it right and you can retain them and grow your revenue.
Amazingly, these are the core metrics for driving innovation and market share — customer obsession. When you’re able to delight your customers and keep them coming back, it’s a sign of success in the long term.
Customer obsession means continuously adding value to the customer experience. And to do that entails collecting customer feedback regularly and prioritising customer needs in every business goal.
According to NEXEA — a company that invests in startups;
“Customer Obsession entails listening to consumers regularly to enrich and improve the customer experience.”
And I like the fact that they distinguished between customer obsession and customer service; “Customer obsession necessitates a paradigm shift in how a company views customer interactions, whereas customer service is only a function of doing business.”
Looking at what it means to be customer-obsessed, especially following the Amazon principles — “start with the customer and work backwards”, makes it look easy, right?
Not really. But doable.
Do The Work. Great Product Alone Will Not Save YOU.
To drive business growth at this time when free money is getting scarce, you need to be thinking about your customers.
It is not enough to have a great product in today’s economy. The idea should be great product x quality customer experience = growth.
That should be your thinking. And no! It’s not about spending more on acquisitions and retention with ads or more money spending.
One strategy is to use The Clock Model. A term used by NYU Prof. of Marketing — Scot Galloway in this insight video. The clock model is a metaphor for all of the touchpoints a consumer has with a brand: pre-purchase, purchase, and post-purchase. It’s one of those frameworks in brand strategy.
The idea is to think about how to best invest your limited capital efficiently across the clock to drive business growth.
Let’s Continue. Keep on Obsessing and Retain that Customer
To stay competitive, and fight and earn every dollar from your customer, leverage the concept of customer obsession. It is a better way and helps drive not just growth but also innovation within your company.
Customer retention is one of the biggest drivers of revenue growth, and that’s almost impossible without delighted customers. If you’re not delighting your customers, you sincerely do not deserve their hard-earned dollars. 😊
Here are Three Key Components That can Help YOU
To drive innovation, market share and growth — business and revenue, start with these three key components outlined below.
Gain a better understanding of your customers
The first and most crucial step is to know your customers. To gather this information, you can use a combination of surveys, customer service data, social media monitoring, and analytics. These channels will provide different insights into user behaviour and purchasing habits.
Improve customer support
To improve customer support, do the following:
- Answer any questions your customers have.
- Respond to customer complaints in a timely and professional manner.
- Respond to feedback that your customers provide after purchasing or using one of your products or services.
- Identify problems that your customers are experiencing with your product or service, then fix them. Resolve issues as quickly as possible.
By improving customer support and overall communication, you’ll be able to increase customer satisfaction, which will go on to improve customer loyalty for future transactions.
Drive customer growth
Driving customer growth should be deliberate. One way to drive customer growth is to expand your business reach — targeting new segments or regions in your present market or it can mean expanding into entirely new markets.
Once you’ve expanded and have customers who like your product, you should focus on customer acquisition and retention to help that business continue to grow. You should pay attention to the clock model and Bowman’s strategy clock to understand where your strength lies and invest your limited capital efficiently.
I’ll leave you in the words of Jeff Bezos;
“We’re not competitor obsessed, we’re customer-obsessed. We start with what the customer needs and we work backwards.”
Hi! I write about products, marketing and growth. Subscribe here to start receiving these insights once a week. Samson
