Are You Prioritizing Your Customer?

Customers are at the core of all businesses. Whether you are CEO of a Delaware C-corporation or a sole proprietor, you started a business to solve a customer problem. The longer you’re in business, the more other things can overshadow the simplicity of that original purpose or insight. Focusing on the customer means remembering why you started the business in the first place, and putting your customers’ needs first. 

It does not mean a lot of things you might expect–like charging low prices, being transparent, or explaining yourself to your customers. It only means keeping your focus on the customer. That might mean higher prices, so your business is healthier. It might mean providing a “black box” and not telling customers how things work, because if you do they get hung up on irrelevant objections. It just means that you focus on the customer. 

Keeping the focus on the customer can be as simple as ensuring you, and everyone at your company, consistently puts themselves in the customer’s shoes and looks at each decision from the customer’s vantage point.

 Straightforward in principle but, in practice, difficult.

Here are 5 tactics beyond this simple mindset to bring a customer focus to your daily work.

• Build a strong customer success team. Involve them in product development and other aspects of daily operations. While not empowered to make product decisions, their voice will help guide you towards delighting customers.

• Build a customer advisory board. Meet with them regularly. This is particularly useful for early stage, pre-product companies, and when launching new products at any stage.

• Make customer interviews a required part of product development. 

• Talk to customers regularly and create moments for your product and engineering teams to meet customers–at all stages of growth, not just early stage. Big industry conferences or your own user conferences can be great venues for this.

• Use tools that give you insights into what customers actually do with your software, such as Fullstory for SaaS applications. These tools show you exactly what your customers do with your software and where they struggle or use it “wrong”.

While implementing tactics to focus yourself and team on the customers first can help, nothing is a substitute for repeating the importance of customer focus at every opportunity. By making decisions focused on your customers’ interests–and telling the team that is why the decision was made–it will be clear that you are willing to sacrifice in order to maintain your customer focus. 

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