What is customer orientation? Have you heard the phrase “Customer is always right” or “Customer is the king”? The phrases are a slogan that puts customer satisfaction as a high priority. In other words, whenever the customer is unsatisfied with a product or service, the business will try to fix that.
While, in some cases, the customer is not always right, let’s put this matter aside. Although that phrase is well-known, and yet… many businesses still prioritize the company’s needs –gaining more profit, more sales, business growth, and cutting costs– over what the customer needs.
You’re right if you think a company’s needs are essential; however, is implementing a sales-oriented business over a customer-oriented the right business approach? Here’s the answer: Your competitors might choose the sales-oriented approach, and that’s a mistake.
They’re not taking a customer-oriented approach. There is your opportunity to do what your competitors don’t do, which is to get and keep more customers by doing a better job of putting customer needs first.
And your approach to customer service can play a significant role here. The key to doing it is customer orientation. This article will cover what you should know about customer orientation to understand it better.
Also read: Get To Know About Customer Relationship Management Software.
Table of Content
Customer Orientation Definition
Customer orientation is a business strategy that prioritizes customers first over the company. In short, put customers’ needs above anything else. The reason why customer orientation is essential is that this method strives to meet customers’ needs in order to keep them as loyal customers for a more extended time. Also, it assists businesses in naturally attracting customers to their offers.
Customer orientation, in the field of customer service, refers to providing customers with supportive, personalized, and holistic results. If you use this method, it will make you understand more about your customer’s needs.
In other words, shifting away from sales-oriented business models (ones that concentrate on sales or discounts) toward inbound marketing strategies by implementing a customer orientation strategy is a good strategy. As a result, your company can develop long-lasting relationships with customers.
Because of this, it is possible to turn it into sales, ultimately resulting in the company gaining more profit. Here are more reasons why you should focus on the needs of your customers:
- Maintaining existing customers is far easier than acquiring new ones.
- Good customer service makes customers loyal.
- It may help (and even make) your company more money and sales for long-term benefit.
How is Customer Orientation Implemented?
Many big companies are implementing the customer-orientation approach; one of them is Amazon. “Start with the customer and work backward” is how Amazon describes and explains the philosophy of its business approach.
The philosophy is to show how strong Amazon’s obsession with providing excellent customer service. The company will go to extraordinary lengths to ensure the customer is satisfied.
Even the CEO of Amazon, Jeff Bezos, reads customers’ complaints sent to their email. It concludes that Amazon’s business approach, which puts a strong emphasis on customers, turned out to be a promising approach for them.
So, how do we implement customer orientation as a business approach? Well, you can’t put your consumers’ problems first unless you fully understand the needs and concerns of customers.
After you’ve completed that, you’ll be able to begin restoring the “customer” to “customer service.” Here are nine things that will help you implement customer orientation effectively;
1. Make it easy for customers to contact you
The first thing, which is also the most important thing, is to listen to your customers. Make it easy for your customers to contact you through live chat, phone calls, email, SMS, WhatsApp, social media, etc.
If you choose email as support to communicate with customers about their needs, inquiries, or complaints, using an email marketing management system will make it easy. Such a system will create, customize, and send relevant emails to segmented subscribers, customers, or leads. Also, to answer emails directly through the system.
Putting your email, call center number, or social media icons as a place for receiving complaints or assistance is sufficient. However, customers in today’s business world expect real-time communication and prefer it online through a live chat.
According to live chat statistics, around 73% of customers say live chat is the most preferred method of communication rather than email. This mode of communication has become a top customer preference.
For this reason, with the help of a complete help desk and customer service system, you can provide the best possible customer service through direct interaction between the admin and the customer.
2. Hire friendly and problem-solving employees
A great customer service agent has long desirable skills. You should hire a perfect candidate as a CS agent who fits the “Hire for attitude and train for skill” criteria. Building a customer-oriented support team entails finding people who are delighted to hear from customers, eager to assist, and genuinely engaged. Unlike skill sets, you should consider attitude as the primary qualification because nothing can easily replicate the good attitude of a CS agent in the market.
3. Treat your staff members as your most valuable asset or resource
Your most valuable resource is your employee. How your staff feels about their daily work greatly affects how they interact with consumers. Happy and committed employees perform better and interactively communicate with customers more effectively. Instead of concentrating on how they feel mistreated, they might focus on creating a lasting connection with customers and finding solutions.
Also read: Top 4 CRM Model To Increase Your Customer Loyalty
4. Educate your workforce
Ensure that every customer service agent of your business knows the company’s goals and expectations. It is crucial to provide education and training that should cover who your customers are, how they use your product, and how to solve customer wants.
A company must educate employees about everything, from straightforward and time-efficient complaint resolution to personalized and compassionate customer care support. If your CS teams are aware of the direction the business is moving and believe in the values it upholds, then their ambitions will align with the company’s goals.
5. Show an example
The focus on providing excellent customer service shouldn’t be restricted as the only support employees’ responsibility. It is relevant at every business level, from the CEO and upper management to the salespeople. The key to keep in mind is that the whole company’s culture should be supportive of actions focused on the client.
When assisting one customer takes a very long time, customer service agents may get bored and tend to hurry the conversation to a conclusion without ensuring that the consumer is delighted.
On the other hand, if workers are aware that their superiors and coworkers value their efforts and are willing to provide a hand with non-standard demands, this creates the perfect example for succeeding in customer orientation.
6. Get customer feedback
Voice of the customer as feedback enables businesses to understand better and meet the expectations of their customers, as well as to make data-driven decisions to increase business growth.
Your customer feedback can help you improve your company’s service or products. Based on the data stored and data received from what customers said, you can create a future decision regarding how pricing should be structured, what products or services should be developed, and many more.
7. Make a customer value proposition (CVP)
Determine what advantages your consumer expects or wants from your company in exchange for loyalty. Then, at each organizational level, divide it into deliverables. By asking yourself these critical questions, you should be able to think of practical solutions to fulfill what you promised to the customer.
8. Monitor and follow up on the procedures
Customers’ needs are in a constant state of flux; or tend to change easily, not to mention that sometimes there are several business trends in the background. Thus, keeping track of these needs is vital.
Be careful to examine the outcomes once you have put the customer first and applied the technique. Are more customers content with the customer-oriented approach you provide? Or do they still have complaints or inquiries and need improvements? You must monitor and follow up on your customer satisfaction measures to know the answer.
Customer Orientation Skills
There are further skills of customer orientation your employees should adapt in their daily jobs, and those are;
- Empathy
- Open-mindedness,
- Adaptability,
- Conflict resolution,
- Out of the box and
- Decision-making.
Components of a Customer-Oriented Strategy
1. Use the feedback from the customer to improve business
Let your customers send their feedback to identify areas that need improvement. Sending out surveys is a simple approach to accomplishing this goal. The surveys will discover areas where you are not doing well and need improvement.
Aside from surveys and using a form builder, there are other methods for determining how customers see your company. For example, social media is one of the best and easiest ways. You can use the power of social media to monitor, interact, and build connections with your customers to keep more clients.
You will likely encounter the same questions on your social media accounts. And that’s great; you will understand the fundamental issues with your product or service and the sources of uncertainty you need to eliminate and improve.
2. Customer service and sales work together as a team
If the sales and customer service teams collaborate, the customer will get even better service, which in the end, increases the company’s business growth. Sales and customer service should work together to maximize lead conversions using the ERP CRM System.
Because when a customer wants to know more about a new product, it’s easy for a CS agent to let the sales team know about it immediately. The sales team can quickly send hard technical questions to support agents who can better answer them.
The faster a customer gets the proper assistance, the faster to solve their problem and the quicker they will be satisfied.
Ways to Improve Customer Service
A customer-oriented approach means building a solid connection with customers to keep them loyal. How? Making your customers happy and providing the best service by automating back-end administration tasks with Singapore’s no.1 Help Desk & Ticketing System are the solutions.
Excellent customer service brings benefits such as making customers loyal and increasing sales for long-term benefits. However, maintaining existing customers is as essential as getting new ones. Keeping existing customers is also the right strategy to stay and build connections. You can use the Best ERP CRM-Leads to maintain retention with permanent and existing consumers.
CRM plays an essential role in business development, which is for maintaining retention with permanent consumers in one network and increasing collaboration between teams so that the work process in business becomes more integrated and efficient.
At first, CRM relied on handwriting and Rolodex. However, the modern business world has tools, strategies, or processes that help businesses manage and access customer data better with the help of CRM systems to maximize lead conversions.
Also read: What Is CRM System Meaning, Features and Benefits
Conclusion
To sum it up, aside from providing excellent customer service, you also must maintain retention with permanent consumers with the Best ERP CRM-Leads. Such a system will automate your sales pipeline, convert more qualified leads, and win more deals with Singapore’s most complete, fully integrated CRM System.
The reason you should use an automated system is; that customer service is one of the most important chances to give a great experience to customers. The manual method of CRM causes a slow work process and the absence of integration between various divisions in one database.
Based on the explanation above in this article, a CRM system can be the solution to help you do customer orientation, while help desk systems do customer service optimally. If you integrate both techniques or another system into ERP software, you’ll gain more sales and profit coming up to your business in the long term. Here download the pricing scheme to calculate the price, or try our free demo by clicking this
