The Importance of Customer Focus: Definition, Strategies and Examples

Whether it’s about writing great lead generation content, compelling prospects to make a purchase, resolving support tickets, maximizing customer lifetime value (CLV), or improving your net promoter score, your customer needs must come first. The quality of your customer experience heavily influences customer loyalty, conversion, and your customer churn rate. To uplevel your competitive edge and build a customer-oriented reputation, you must be customer-focused.

With the modern consumer inundated with endless sales pitches and choices, standing out from competitors requires more than just a great product or service. Every aspect of your customer experience must put customer focus first.

What is customer focus?

Customer focus is a customer relationship and conversion strategy crucial to maximizing CLV (Customer Lifetime Value). In many ways, customer focus simply translates to good marketing. Customer focus means precisely what it sound like: focusing on customer needs, pain points, shopping patterns, and everything between to ensure the overall customer experience results in:

• Repeated business
• Increased customer satisfaction
• Reduced churn rate metrics

Why is customer focus important in business?

Customer focus is a business practice that some businesses do well, and their revenue reflects how consumers respond. Brands that prioritize a customer-focused strategy see a remarkable boost in customer satisfaction, customer lifespan, and customer lifetime value (CLV)—which means more revenue year over year.

This guide offers examples, important terminology, and actionable strategies that your business can use to improve customer focus and nurture lasting relationships with customers.

How To Improve Customer Focus

A customer focus strategy really emphasizes practice as a verb because it’s a skill that must be built. If you want to know how to improve customer focus, you’ll need to experiment, make mistakes, listen to experts (your customers), and make tweaks to your process.

To understand the importance of the following strategies, think about customer-focused service as four components that shape the entire customer experience.

• Provide a user-friendly experience on all of your platforms

• Ensure customer-first convenience for all interactions

• Maintain clear and accountable communication
• Improve shopping experiences with personalization

The following seven strategies incorporate these fundamental concepts and can be implemented immediately. But remember, customer focus requires practice and adjustment to master.

1. Leverage AI To Meet Customer Needs

Creating a customer-focused culture means taking a proactive approach to customer experience and customer feedback. The most efficient and cost-effective way to stay responsive to customer needs is by leveraging artificial intelligence (AI).

Implementing intuitive automations, centralizing customer communications, and using highly trained AI in tandem with your customer service and sales teams ensures no customer is overlooked—which can positively impact your customer satisfaction (CSAT) score.

2. Focus on Service Quality

Great customer service blends empathy, expertise, and efficiency. If you want your customer focus efforts to drive better customer retention metrics and CSAT scores, prioritizing service quality is crucial. This may seem obvious at first, but it takes training, clear expectations, processes, and empathy for your customer service and sales team.

Along with training and professional development, provide your support team with the right tools and resources to ensure exceptional customer-facing interactions at all times.

3. Make Your Customers Feel Heard

Customer focus means putting your customer first. Along with responsive customer service, improve customer success results by sending feedback surveys that ask about their experience with your company. Feedback surveys give customers the chance to share what they like and dislike about your customer experience.

This process fosters positive customer relationships and loyalty by showing empathy and a willingness to take feedback into consideration. It also provides helpful data to inform a better customer journey–improving customer retention metrics.

4. Meet Customer Expectations

Part of an effective customer journey is backing up your words with action. If you promise a convenient customer support experience, an ethical company culture, and a customer-centric experience, then that must be the standard time and time again.

If you’re a customer-focused business that wants to get ahead of competitors, you must understand modern consumers’ expectations and prioritize exceeding them.

• Prioritize multi-platform UX, as your customer experience must be accessible on desktop and mobile devices.

• Ensure your customer support team is readily available on all of your customer-facing touchpoints.

• Handle customer feedback with grace and appreciation.

5. Use Feedback as a Tool in Your Customer Focus Strategy

Customer feedback is intrinsic to a customer focus strategy. You can theorize and internally test your customer experience extensively, but your customers are the experts.

Their customer feedback is an invaluable tool in your customer retention strategy, as customer reviews and feedback surveys offer key insight into how well your customer-centric efforts are working.

6. Combine Data With Empathy

Businesses will struggle to lower churn rates and improve relationships with customers if they don’t unite metrics and data with empathy and intuition.

• Striving to be customer-focused isn’t just about solving pain points; it’s also about how you address them.
• Providing customer-centric communications isn’t just about sending customer feedback surveys; it’s about how you ask the questions.
• Creating a customer-focused culture isn’t just about explaining expectations to your customer service team, it’s about empowering a productive and confident mindset.

The effort to do things the right way goes a long way with customer satisfaction.

7. Support the Teams That Support Customers

Your customer service and sales teams are one of the main factors influencing both customer relationships and the customer experience. For example, the majority of consumers (80%) surveyed by Zendesk will drop a company after two or more unpleasant customer service experiences.

Supporting your front line is a key, but often overlooked, aspect of customer-focused strategies. Here’s how to support your front line:

• Create a knowledge base for those on the front line of your customer facing processes.

• Create clear customer service processes, including how much wiggle room your support team has to meet customer needs.

• Automate customer support and management processes to lower manual data entry and optimize workflow.

• Implement customer service tools that help expedite AHT (average handling time) by automatically displaying all relevant customer call data.

• Create a supportive and empowering company culture.

• Define realistic expectations and customer experience KPI metrics that help build your support team’s skills, understanding, and confidence.

10 Customer Focus Examples

With best practices to help you develop an effective customer focus strategy, it’s time to inspire you with 10 exceptional customer-centric brands who’ve mastered customer-focused mindsets.

1. Zappos

The popular shoe brand, Zappos, exemplifies customer-centricity on the front line and internally. Zappos accomplishes high CSAT by empowering new hires with a comprehensive six-week training program (including a four-week bootcamp and two weeks in a call center).

On the customer-facing side of things, Zappos offers a convenient and customer-oriented return process. It also has excellent customer appreciation promotions that inspire customer loyalty year after year.

2. Four Seasons

Legendary hotel chain Four Seasons stays customer-oriented by incorporating technology to optimize its customer relationship and customer support efforts. This technology lets them provide support in the customer’s native language, regardless of the communication channel.

They also use automation technology to make it easy for customers to personalize and manage accommodations, reservations, recommendations, and more.

3. Rentman

Communication is the key to Rentman’s customer-focused business strategy. Offering software that optimizes operations for event and media rental services, they use customer AI and communication technology (and acquired customer feedback) to ensure all interactions (from initial consultations to final payments) are convenient, efficient, and fast. All of these factors help lower the churn rate and keep CSAT scores above 90%.

4. McDonald’s

With its world-famous catchphrase, the fast food monolith, McDonald’s, demonstrates its customer-oriented commitment with multiple ways to place orders (mobile app, kiosks, dual drive through, etc.). It offers extensive customization and fast and friendly customer service (drive-through, front-end, and tableside in some places). It also rewards mobile app users with great deals, including a Free Fries Friday for mobile orders.

5. Dollar Shave Club

One of the pioneers of influencer marketing, Dollar Shave Club has always understood that building and nurturing customer relationships is just as important as solving its target audience’s pain points. Its customer-oriented approach begins with highly flexible subscription plans that give customers control over their product choices and delivery schedule (frequency). It also offers great prices for its products, which helps foster trust and makes it easier for customers to convert due to the low barrier of entry.

6. HubSpot

Even if you only dip your toe into marketing and customer success research, you’ll likely come across HubSpot. But helping its customers develop better relationships with customers isn’t just their service—it’s intrinsic to its company culture.

At every level, HubSpot is customer-focused. You can check out HubSpot’s ten tenets here to see how it keeps everyone in the organization in a customer-oriented mindset.

7. Starbucks

Needing no introduction, the coffee franchise is a great example of a customer-focused strategy (and customer loyalty) in action. Aside from being easily accessible and conveniently located, it elevates customer-centric operations with a highly intuitive and user-friendly mobile app that makes it easy to order, purchase, and accumulate points in its loyalty program.

8. Slack

Developed to help teams of any size communicate more effectively, Slack ensures a customer-oriented experience by prioritizing customer-centric KPIs (even over financial metrics) like CLV and NPS (Net Promoter Scores). With a focus on taking customer feedback seriously throughout its fast growth, it stands apart from competitors and enjoys healthy customer loyalty.

9. Hilton Hotels

Hilton Hotel offers special rewards to improve its customer loyalty and CLV (customer lifetime value) rates. What’s intuitive and effective about these reward programs is their adaptability. Hilton doesn’t stagnate, using customer feedback to help shape its loyalty program. This simple prioritization and customer-centricity helps the brand stay relevant amidst a sea of competitors and results in lower churn rate metrics.

10. Patagonia

This popular outdoor apparel brand took customer feedback to an entirely new level when its customers communicated their desire to see more sustainable practices by Patagonia.

The brand not only adopted more eco-friendly practices but also demonstrated remarkable accountability by addressing their role in greenhouse gas emissions and their strategies to reduce them (such as reducing their absolute Scope 1 and 2 GHG emissions by 80% by 2030).

The Next Step in Improving Customer Focus: Podium’s AI Employee

Because customer satisfaction and customer success hinges on the quality and speed of customer service, being readily available can mean the difference between winning and losing customers.

Podium’s AI Employee and lead gen platform is the ideal way to ensure every customer feels heard, valued, and satisfied with your service.

By centralizing all customer feedback and communications into one user-friendly platform, you can provide immediate, expert assistance that sounds and responds so intuitively that consumers never know they’re speaking with an AI.

Schedule a demo today to learn how Podium’s AI Employee can help you maximize the potential of your customer focus.