Are You a Truly Customer-Oriented Retailer?

Razan Saleh

Content Manager – MENA

Being customer-centric and implementing a company-wide customer-oriented product strategy is essential in today’s highly competitive and global marketplace – particularly in an environment with low barriers to entry, low customer switching costs, and frequent product and service updates. To accomplish so, you must prioritize the consumer in all you do while keeping in mind the customer is always right, even when they are wrong.

Keeping your customers happy and satisfied can be a full-time job. The task becomes even harder if you’re not implementing any specific customer orientation tactics such as meeting their rising expectations and being available on their preferred digital channels. Without a doubt, the Internet plays a major role during the discovery process for both online and in-store buyers, especially in the MENA region. A recent study by Bain & Company found that 48% of UAE and KSA consumers are getting their shopping ideas and inspirations online. This is nearly double the numbers in countries like the U.K. and Germany.

Customer orientation is a mentality of structuring your entire business around the needs of the customer. From processes to employee training to product development, every part is focused on adapting to consumer behavior. This is true for any business, no matter the size or the sector.

According to Forbes, customer-oriented companies outperform their competition by nearly 80%. With a customer orientation approach, your business would focus directly on solving for the customer. It all boils down to helping people.

Customers like to shop at places where they’re treated as individuals. Why wouldn’t they right? When you focus on impressing your customer and putting them first, they will return. And, not only that, but they will tell their friends and refer them to your brand.

So why follow a customer-orientation approach? For most businesses, it’s more expensive to acquire new customers than to retain current ones. In fact, acquiring a new customer can cost five times more than retaining an existing customer, according to a study by smart insights. Additionally, existing customers are 50% more likely to try new products and spend 31% more than new customers. Therefore, by following a customer orientation approach, you can significantly increase your ROI and drive your business to success.

While there are many tactics to help you get started, let’s dive in and show you how to apply three simple ones to become a truly customer-oriented business.

Meeting customers’ expectations at every step of their journey might sound simple enough, but for many businesses, it means adopting new technology, adding new communication channels, and aligning internal teams to interpret data scattered over different platforms. And as many businesses have tried to standardize much of their service delivery, they were risking themselves in becoming too mechanical and losing sight of the human aspect in keeping their customers satisfied.

It’s vital for businesses to understand that customers are not all the same in order to adapt flexibly to various behaviors. The art of a successful business is achieving a high level of effectiveness while remaining cost-effective and resulting in excellent customer service. To do this, businesses need to understand the importance of aligning internal teams mainly sales & marketing to interpret top-line objectives and exceed the customers’ expectations.

Today more than ever, customers are increasingly drawn to online shopping because it gives them more flexibility and options to choose from. Therefore, it is important for businesses to standardize online and offline support in order to provide a coherent and integrated end-to-end customer experience that is consistent with their brand and value proposition.

Adopting new technology has always been a necessity for successful businesses to remain ahead of the curve and this is nowhere more evident than in the delivery of seamless customer support through cloud-based contact centers. According to the Harvard Business Review, businesses are losing money on digital transformation as they continue to invest in traditional operational and IT services for maintenance rather than cloud-based communication to address many client pain points.

Switching to a cloud-based contact center empowers your agents to provide omnichannel technical support through a single interface. Infobip’s digital cloud contact center solution, Conversations, allows you to integrate multiple channels together so you can provide one experience throughout the entire customer journey while having easy access to the conversation history and previous customer interactions. By having this data in one location, your agents can easily create detailed and accurate customer profiles while delivering truly personalized and seamless support to your customers.

Delivering an exceptional digital customer experience means being present on channels customers prefer while establishing an emotional bond with a human touch. However, personalization doesn’t end with contextual messages – but sending the message on the right channel at the right time. So how can you optimize your communication?

You will need additional tools such as an engagement hub to plot a personalized journey through targeted marketing campaigns and send-time optimization. Infobip’s omnichannel customer engagement hub Moments, lets you automate that process – by allowing you to schedule your messages at each individual customers’ preferred time. Customers want to be treated as individuals, and send-time optimizations helps you achieve just that while increasing their loyalty and improving their overall digital experience.

Customer orientation requires a team effort to get closer to your customers and exceed their expectations. You can’t make people alter their minds, but you can nudge, assist, and push them to make the adjustments that will improve your end-user’s experiences. At the end of the day, customers will reward you if you create experiences they can enjoy and remember. It’s that simple.

Your ability to predict and react to the requirements and demands of your customers will determine whether you succeed or fail. For many businesses, this makes successful customer orientation a top priority, and the simple tactics mentioned above should equip you with all you need to create and implement out your own customer orientation strategy.