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Include your customers in your business strategy in 5 steps

Your customers are at the very core of your organization. They provide the necessary tools and revenue to keep it running strong. Involving your customers in your customer success strategy is key for developing a customer-centric approach. At GriDD we asked our customers about their challenges, insights and tips. Read along and discover how to include your customers in your customer success strategy.

It is a challenge to include your customers in every part of your organization. Reaching out to customers, making customer centricity part of the organizational culture and scaling the use of customer insights within the organization are named to be the biggest challenges. In these five steps you discover how to surmount these challenges.

1. Make customer involvement a key priority

Involving customers in your business strategy is easier than it seems. Even though many sales processes are starting to include the customer’s perspective into their strategy, many organisations haven’t integrated this company-wide yet. Not asking customers frequently for their input leads to overall blindspots. Make sure to involve customers structurally in projects and make it a part of your organization’s nature.

 

2. Adopt the mindset of the customer

Adopting a customer mindset can be difficult when there is a complicated customer landscape with a strong difference between customer, end-user and stakeholder. Other companies are more technical by nature. For them, there can be more focus on the technology or technical solutions than on the customers. Keeping the focus on your customers is key for developing solutions that are tailored to your customers needs. Make sure not to get lost in technical solutions or complexities and always revisit the customer’s wants and needs. Organize customer centricity from the ground up and relate this to the passion of your employees.

 

3. Take a look at your employee culture

The employee culture has an enormous impact on the capabilities of customer inclusion. For the natural CX-minded company it makes sense to connect and engage with customers. For the less CX-minded company, employees might need to learn new skills and attain new knowledge, even something that seems as simple as just talking to customers and understanding how they can be supported in a better way. Make sure to guide your employees in the right direction.

 

4. Use customer data (the right way) to enable customer involvement

Customer data is increasingly available. Apart from interviews, digital journeys result in insights into preferences and behaviour. However, it is a challenge to make this understandable. Data by itself provides no insights to work with. You need to ask the right questions and analyze data in the right way. Make sure to combine quantitive and qualitative data for a holistic view.

 

5. Mobilize the organization effectively

Getting customer-facing colleagues on board is crucial. The sooner your team starts to recognize that they can be more successful with the new customer experience approach, the sooner they adapt their workflows. Involving customers in your organization’s decisions results in more engagement and makes it easier to get feedback on initiatives. It can be a lot harder to find the unmet needs of your customers. Experiments with minimum viable product or minimum viable audience approaches can help to uncover those needs.

We help you make your business-approach customer centric

Including your customers in your business approach is key for developing products that are tailored to your audience’s needs. GriDD helps businesses transform into true customer centric organizations. Do you want to deliver stellar customer experiences? Discover what GriDD can do for your organization and give Mark a call!

Mark Geljon

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