The notion behind customers oriented strategy is very simple and that is customers are always right, even when they’re clearly wrong. According to an estimate, attracting new customers is 5 times costlier than retaining the current customers. It is highly beneficial for your company’s growth if the focus of customer service is on helping people. Today, we’ll discuss what is customer orientation in marketing; its importance, how to implement its strategy, and examples.
What is Customer Orientation in Marketing?
Customer orientation in marketing is a form of business strategy where the first priority of the company is to resolve the problems of customers. It focuses on assisting customers in reaching their goals and objectives. Here, you value the needs and wishes of customers more than the needs of the company. However, it means that your support team is always making efforts to meet the needs of customers.
Instead of directly launching the customer oriented approach, some companies prefer the sales oriented. It means that the company is preferring its needs and wishes over the wants of customers. However, the sales-oriented approach matches up with the inbound strategy.
Inbound customer service is when they offer holistic, human, and helpful solutions to their problems. That’s why customers oriented work well with the inbound strategy while dealing with business.
Importance of Customer Orientation in Marketing
Customer orientation in marketing is highly beneficial for your business for various reasons, and they are as follows;
- A highly cost-effective approach to retain existing ones than attracting the new ones
- Happy and satisfied customers would refer to your products and services in their social circle and act as brand ambassadors.
- You would as have as many promoters of your brand as many of our customers
- Customers of the modern consumer market are highly knowledgeable and aware of their demands and they precisely know what they want
How to Launch Customer Orientation Strategy
Some of the main steps in implementing a customer orientation strategy are as follows;
Hiring Right Staff
Recruiting the right people in your customers service team plays a significant role in delivering the optimum result. While recruiting them, you should keep in mind their attitude and friendliness that you can’t teach rather than their aptitude and skill that they can learn. You should find empathic people that have the motivation to solve problems.
Valuing Employees
Customers’ service is usually a thankless job, they solve customers’ problems and people hang up on them after work. In order to keep their motivation level up, it is important that you should treat them well with good salaries, incentives, and benefits.
Training & Development
Before sending them to solve customers’ issues, you should give them sufficient training that how they approach the problem. The training and development program should comprise customers care, troubleshooting, and product knowledge.
Leading by Example
In order to make this strategy work, the management and leadership team of the company should accept customers-oriented strategy by their strategy. Otherwise, the support staff won’t feel comfortable launching and practicing it.
For instance, if management gives attitude and punishes support staff for resolving problems. It means that the management should focus on analyzing the contradiction between what they say and what they actually practice.
Understanding Customers
In to train and guide your team better, it is important that you should understand your customers. You should teach them to empathize with customers with they’re feeling upset. They should know how to manage upset and frustrated customers.
Repetitive Process
As we are aware of the fact that customer needs, wishes, and wants are always changing, so are their issues and problems. Your support team should know how to deal with the changes. The focus of your business and strategy should be on how to keep up with the pace of changing customers’ needs and meeting them.
Empowering Employees
You should give sufficient power and autonomy to your employees and support staff so that they could solve the customers’ problems on their own. When they have sufficient empowerment, they would suggest reasonable changes that would be beneficial to the company.
Receiving Feedback
The feedback of customers is equally important since their wishes are always changing. When you get feedback from customers regularly, it would offer you a unique competitive edge. Over time, they would easily understand their emotions and state of mind and what type of changes could make them feel better.
Examples of Customer Orientation
Netflix
Netflix is paid online video streaming platform, and the company has changed the whole landscape of the entertainment industry. The platform is excellent at following and implementing the customers oriented approach. However, the focus of the platform is always offering customers to best video content relevant to their interests based on the different segments of the customer market.
Apple
Apple is a tech giant and the world’s leading premium brand smartphone manufacturing company. Ever since its development, the company is always offering unique products and services relevant to their needs and wants along with the best premium quality.
Conclusion: What is Customer Orientation in Marketing? How to, Examples
After an in-depth study of what is customer orientation in marketing; its importance, how to implement it, and examples; we have realized that customers oriented strategy is significant for the growth of your business. If you’re developing its strategy, then you should keep in mind the abovementioned guidelines.
Ahsan Ali Shaw is an accomplished Business Writer, Analyst, and Public Speaker. Other than that, he’s a fun loving person.
