1Business

Customer Focus

Focusing on Customers

Focusing on your customers delivers valuable benefits for them and for your organization. It is critical to understand customers’ needs -sometimes before they even know what they want.

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Customer satisfaction is a key priority

Through customer focus a company or organization focuses on satisfying actual and prospective customers’ needs. To achieve that the business needs to develop a deep knowledge of:

  • Who the business’s customers are
  • What those customers want
  • When and how they want it
  • What they’re willing to pay for the value they receive

Today’s customers are increasingly well informed about the products and services they can choose from. At the same time, they have the ability to share their experiences immediately and widely. For these reasons, customer focus—taking actions to understand and satisfy your customers—is important not only for your organization's profitability, but also for its reputation.

Understanding your customers

Customer focus can help a company: 

  • Acquire customers. By developing deep knowledge of its current customers, a company gains clues to where it should look for new ones, and it also learns how to boost the number and quality of referrals through existing customers.
  • Retain and develop customers. When a business identifies its best customers, it can create a steady stream of revenue by encouraging them to continue to buy products. It can also sell them a variety of items from its different product or service lines. And as their relationship with the company grows, it can personalize offers or even create new offerings that serve their changing needs.
  • Reduce costs. As a company builds relationships with customers and they learn more about it, its product lines, and its processes, the cost of serving them may decline.
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Customers’ changing needs

Regardless of whether they are individuals or organizations, customers’ needs are constantly changing. To stay competitive, organizations need to continually gather data on their customers to understand their shifting characteristics and requirements. Gaining insights about the actual, rather than assumed, needs of your customers helps ensure your products and services provide what your customers truly want and need both now and in the future.