Ultimately it’s the customer that pays the bills, because he chooses to spend money in your business, that’s the ultimate correlation! Influencing the customer means influencing revenue. I can hear you thinking, ‘yeah, that’s what we’re trying to. With sales and marketing and advertising’. I can already tell you this: that’s the opposite of customer centric.
Not one person has ever been happy about the constant commercials and advertising. Not one person has ever loved a sales pitch without being heard themselves. Not one person has ever recommended a company with sleazy marketing tactics just to sell goods.
A customer-centric approach means figuring out who your customer is, what he or she wants and needs, what he or she likes about your brand, products, services and apply all of your internal departments to catering to that customer.
That’s how you make a customer happy and that’s how you ultimately influence revenue:
- Happy customers buy more: they stand for a greater share of wallet.
- Happy customers buy more often: they bring more repeat business.
- Happy customers are more likely to recommend your product/ service/brand: you achieve better word-of-mouth
- Happy customers make for happy employees: the primary factor in making the company a great place to work is how often it puts employees in situations where they can be proud of the way they treat customers. Happy customers, happy shareholders.
That simple. But is it?
Well, as it turns out, it’s not always easy to know what it is precisely that makes your customers happy. So the influencing part is a challenging one!
And to influence for the better, starts with understanding. Only by having a clear insight on that can you steer your operations, marketing, sales, hr, strategy into working together for the benefit of the customer happiness.
