4 Easy Ways for Businesses to Become Customer Centric

Most people understand what a customer centric approach refers to, but struggle to apply it in real life. This is evident in customer service operations where interacting with customers is at the core of job responsibilities. Frontline employees should be patient and alert when communicating with a customer. This involves thinking beyond the realm of what the customer is asking. Rather than merely providing straight answers, the employee should try to put the customer at ease. The idea is to impress the customer with the organization’s portfolio of services and understand the root cause of the customer’s problem. This helps in two ways.

Firstly, the customer is educated about the organization’s range of services. Secondly, more problems can be identified at their root level. This ensures that similar problems don’t arise in the future. Feedback collated from frontline employees helps the organization understand how present and prospective customers view their brand/services.

Here, we talk about how a practical and easy-to-adopt customer-centric approach can be established at an organizational level:

Get Methodical

For sustained customer engagement & retention, employees should work towards addressing every customer grievance in a timely manner and finding a quick resolution. It is better to chart-out the entire route of communication with a customer. This makes it easier to assess the readiness of a business to constructively interact with customers. Each point of interaction can be then handled individually.

Be Patient

It is highly probable that a newly-acquired, customer-centric approach doesn’t yield immediate results. Positive outcome will surface but it takes time. Maintain your patience and don’t change your customer communication protocols repeatedly.

Don’t Impose upon the Customer

Every business wants to create a certain kind of impression among its past, present, and prospective customers. However, it is also important to be sensitive towards how customers perceive your brand. A brand image cannot be imposed upon people. It has to be subtly expressed throughout the chain of communication.

Get Technical & Social but Don’t Overdo It

Yes, doing things manually is passé. However, don’t incorporate technology that confuses your staff and overwhelms customers. Try to select technologies that provide easy-to-handle interfaces and don’t restrict in-person communication with customers. For instance, after addressing a customer grievance, a note can be made in the organizational software for the concerned manager. Similarly, a schedule for customer dealings can be automated, but the actual interaction should have the human touch. Ensure that every bit of data is entered on a daily basis. The adopted data management system should be configured smartly. Relevant data should be shared with the respective department heads at the end of the day.

Don’t discourage the use of social media tools to communicate with customers and create brand awareness. However, chasing customers to comment on your Facebook page is not recommended! Use social media to keep your customers informed. An informed customer is more likely to be an engaged and a repeat customer. When on social media, keep it limited to groups/forums that are relevant.

Why Newsfeed Marketing Rocks

Marketers like us have learned some long lasting lessons from traditional methods of advertising. Things like structuring the content around long-term campaigns. Advertising taglines like “I’m Lovin’ it,” and “A Diamond is Forever,” were all well planned marketing endeavors designed to be splashed across different media for a long term increase in product sales.

Today’s scenario is different. With the increasing role of social media and everyone wanting instant online gratification, the old school of advertising cannot survive.

Of course, long term ad campaigns do have their importance, but not at all times and in all places. When we’re looking to produce interesting content for social platforms, we cannot spend weeks and months. This is because online people are an impatient lot. Simply put, customers are not content in waiting for content.

Newsfeed Marketing

It’s time to bid adieu to traditional campaigns and welcome "Newsfeed Marketing." This kind of marketing involves creating branded content in real time and putting it on your customers’ social newsfeeds.

We marketers think a lot about strategies and techniques of implementation, but often don’t manage to create shareable and relevant online content. We need to do rather than think. So instead of thinking whether it’s a beautiful day outside, post a fabulous picture of a park on Facebook. Tweet the picture!

Since there are enough resources handy, we can easily jump on to the latest trends and keep pace with the super-fast speed of pop-culture. By posting images relevant to current events, it becomes easy to drive fan engagement since you’re making a contribution towards something bigger.

Real Time Branded Content

Here are some easy ways to get started with branded content in real time:

·         Seek inspiration from Twitter’s trending topics.

·         Stay updated with the latest events by following news sites like Imgur and Reddit.

·         RSS readers like Feedly can help you keep a watch on the latest news and stories.

As marketers, we need to understand that the definition of “great” content is constantly changing in our world which is driven by newsfeeds. Content that’s likely to rule is real-time, culturally-relevant, and visual. What works today may not work tomorrow. So each day, we must try to work towards content that puts our brand in focus. Then customers relate to the content and the brand gets humanized.

Though real-time marketing may never replace traditional campaigns completely, it’s becoming quite clear that it’s an important component of all marketing mixes. Brands are required to be aware of and in sync with happenings all over at all times.

There’s better engagement when there’s plenty of your content in people’s newsfeeds. Everyone likes to share something that makes them look positive. So if they share a funny photo, their followers will think they’re funny. Similarly, sharing inspirational quotes makes them look sensitive and motivated.

The Bottom Line

The bottom line is that your stuff has a better chance of being shared by your customers if they consider it relevant and newsworthy. As marketers, we must make it our primary job to contribute as much as we can to all those information exchanges that are already happening online.

How to Create and Implement User-Centric SEO with Searcher Personas

In the early days of SEO, keywords were everything. SEO experts used to ask webmasters to stuff keywords into their articles. That strategy used to work too.

But Google made significant changes to its ranking algorithm in the last few years. SEO strategies that used to work until a few years ago no longer produce the same results. Worse still, many of them have started producing exactly opposite results.

Algorithmic updates aren’t the only problem webmasters face these days. Google has made all organic searches secure so the keyword data is not readily available. And with the launch of Hummingbird, Google has become much better at understanding conversational search queries. Keyword search volume data too is hard to find now.

The message Google wants to send out is clear: move away from keywords and focus your attention on the user for whom you are creating content and products.

What does this user-centric approach mean for SEO? And how are webmasters supposed to put this concept into practice?

If you run an online business, it is easy to get distracted by the SERPs and ignore the real reason you are building your products or services: the customer. It is the customer who searches for your products and hence they should be the foundation of your online and offline marketing efforts including your SEO strategy.

Developing a user-centric SEO strategy is relatively easy. You just need to develop searcher personas. What are searcher personas? Understanding the needs of each and every customer is not possible. Instead, SEOs must work with the objective of grouping together target customers who have the same needs. You can call each group a persona.

To create a persona, you will need to use information gathered from user polls, market search, keyword search volumes etc. 

Know Your Target Customer

The first thing you need to do is to identify your target audience. Ask yourself who your target customer is. Are you trying to attract people belonging to a particular age group? Any business owner should be able to answer that question.

Once you have identified your target group, the next step is to understand their problems. What are they searching for? Determine the search queries that they use to find your business. You can use these queries as your keywords/ key phrases.

You may focus on any one type of persona. This approach works best when you operate in a small niche. Or you can target 3-5 personas. If you create multiple personas, find a title for each one of them. Now try to find out as much as possible about these personas. You can use your own knowledge and assumptions.   You can also use information gathered from your keyword research. Finding the right data is probably the toughest part, but it is very important.

By creating a searcher persona, marketers can accurately define their target customer. It helps them understand how customers are searching for their products/services. And this knowledge will help them improve their rate of conversion.

Keyword research is still important, but now SEOs have to focus on searcher personas as well. Once you have built the personas, you need to develop and execute the marketing strategies that deal with their unique needs. Remember that these personas are the real people you are trying to market your products to.