How Brands Can Build Customer-Centric Marketing Strategies

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How to Become Customer Centric

The good news is that customer-centricity isn’t simply born into companies, it’s something any brand can build at any time. Becoming customer-centric is a many-pronged strategy and one that must be built to your needs over multiple years.

Start you customer-centricity journey here:

Optimize and align your owned assets

Infrastructure is a major challenge for brands that aim for more customer-centricity. This can include CRM and customer management platforms, feedback systems, and more. But the overlooked aspect is your network of web assets.

Orchestrating the customer journey, a core customer-centric tenet, means that you have to align all of your online real estate to tell your brand story consistently. You also must tell the right brand story depending on where your audience lands in the sales funnel. Breaks in the chain are no joke.

Optimizing your assets involves great storytelling and content, technical superiority, constant iteration, and an overall asset strategy. Until you take this deep dive and make the appropriate investments across your network of assets, your customer-centric strategy will be dead on arrival.

Hire a chief customer officer

Any executive can be a leader in customer-centricity, but it’s wise to hire a chief customer officer or CCO. The CCO role is involved in leading the company’s overall customer-centric strategy and managing the overall relationship with the brand’s customer base.

Bringing on an expert to lead your customer-focused initiatives can help you move towards customer-centricity in larger ways. This is the first step of transitioning over to the new approach, which will also require a small team. Prioritizing customer relationships is worth the investment.

Build a culture of customer centricity

A customer-centric culture is another important part of putting the customer first. If a brand wants to relate with real people and help them achieve their goals, internal alignment is required. This means that your people, at every level, need to operate in a different way.

Every single team should be educated and trained so that their work and professional commitments begin with delighting the end customer. This applies to internally facing teams, not just account management or sales. 

Another element to creating a culture unified around the customer is de-siloing various disciplines. Your customer data, production, communications and marketing, sales, account management, and more must play well together in pursuit of the weighty customer focus objectives.

Gather customer feedback

Brands often conduct surveys and post-sale feedback gathering efforts to close the loop. What many miss is how to actually use this feedback to generate actionable insights to help boost customer-centricity.

Customer feedback shouldn’t stop at confirming what you know or challenging you to improve. It should dictate how you operate as a company. The feedback you collect should be analyzed carefully to create new company initiatives that address the fundamental issues customer complaints point out.

Be accessible

Consider your interactions with the brands you buy from. What keeps you coming back? What are your customer service interactions like? And, how hard was it to reach the company? The best rated customer-centric brands give you exactly what you want, make customer service a breeze, and are easy to access. This is a fundamental of customer-centricity.

Amazon, for example, offers extremely fast and easy live chats with agents who actually want to help you. Apple offers personalized services scheduled when it works for you. And reaching the brand is as simple as walking into an Apple Store.

Accessibility is half the battle. Get it right and your brand’s reputation will show that you care about your individual customers.

Metrics to measure customer-centric performance

Like other unique approaches to business, customer-centric strategy has the benefit of measurability. Brands can set any number of KPIs, metrics, and other success goals to get a read on performance. From these metrics, brands can then revise and refine their strategy.

Churn rate

Churn rate, or customer attrition, measures the (usually annual) percentage of customers who stop doing business with a given company. It’s driven by many, many factors including customer experience, branding, and more.

Churn rate formula:

(Lost customers / total customers at the start of time period) x 100

Net promoter score (NPS)

Ever filled out a survey or online review of a brand? You most likely answered a version of the question, “On a scale from 0 to 10, how likely are you to recommend this product/company to a friend or colleague?” 

That’s net promoter score, or NPS, and it is used to assess customer satisfaction, loyalty, and enthusiasm for a given company.

NPS data is collected from a broad range of customers, who are categorized as detractors (0–6 rating), passives (7–8 rating), and promoters (9–10 rating), which is then aggregated and turned into a score.

Net promoter score formula:

NPS = % promoters – % detractors

Customer satisfaction (CSAT)

Another metric, expressed as a percentage, is customer satisfaction. It’s a key performance indicator that measures product quality and how well customers are engaging with the product. It helps brands assess customer retention as well.

Like net promoter score, CSAT is based on one question: “How would you rate your overall satisfaction with the [goods/service] you received?” 

Using a one to five scale, customers can answer in one of the following ways: very satisfied, unsatisfied, neutral, satisfied, or very satisfied.

Composite customer satisfaction score formula:

(Number of satisfied customers (4 and 5) / Number of survey responses) x 100 = % of satisfied customers

Customer effort score (CES)

CES measures the overall effort required for a customer to get a given issue with a company resolved. This can include request fulfillment, product returns or refunds, receiving a troubleshooting answer, and more. It’s a key indicator for churn rate.

Customer effort surveys ask the question, “On a scale of very easy to very hard, how easy was it to interact with [brand name]?” and is scored on a numeric range.

Customer effort score formula:

Sum of customer effort ratings / Number of survey responses

Customer lifetime value (CLV)

Customer lifetime value measures the total expected income a business will collect from an individual customer over the entire customer relationship. Essentially, it’s the dollar amount you spend while you remain a customer. This is often compared to customer acquisition cost (CAC) to estimate profitability by customer segment.

Customer lifetime value formula:

Average transaction size x Number of transactions x Retention period

Brands can use the above metrics to get a handle on the success of their efforts to build better customer connections.

Final Thoughts

If your brand is not centering the customer at the heart of everything you do, then it’s time to make customer-centricity your number one priority. As the digital transformation continues and competition ratchets up, an authentic customer focus not only builds better relationships, it builds better products, too.

The bottom line is that the brand heroes — the true standouts in any industry — reach dominance because they understand their customer and continually reinvest in developing deeper relationships with them. Leaders bring a unique perspective to the world, but tailor it to the needs of customers and tell the stories that truly resonate.

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