This week, we’re wrapping up our multi-week introduction to our newest Blue Zenith venture, Go Ahead. Dream Big.
Your Day-To-Day Business Operations
In our previous post, we discussed how the value proposition of your business is a vital component of successfully bringing your offline business online. Simply put, your value proposition is a clear, concise summary of the value your business provides to your ideal customer, target market, and prospective customers in general. While extremely important, your value proposition is just one component of your entire offline to online initiative, and it’s a part of a larger, more generalized approach your business must take to your online initiatives – adopting a customer-centric approach to just about every aspect of the way you do business. While a customer-centric approach sounds relatively simple on paper and may even sound like a business cliché (after all, what business doesn’t care about customers?), transforming your business can be a serious undertaking that requires a serious commitment to often change some of the ways you present and operate your business on a day-to-day basis, and that’s where Go Ahead. Dream Big. can help!
It’s Not Just About Customer Service
As we previously mentioned, bringing up “customer-centric” around many seasoned business professionals may elicit a rolling of the eyes, simply because it’s an overused concept in business development. Any entrepreneur, freelancer, or business manager with any degree of success understands how important customers are. In fact many of us were introduced to the concept on the first day of our first jobs! However, believing that adopting a vague focus on customer service is the extent of a successful “customer-centric” strategy would be the same as believing that regularly changing the oil in your car is the extent of a successful car maintenance and repair plan. A comprehensive and successful customer-centric approach to doing business begins well before a customer walks through your door or visits your website, and simply being polite and helpful to a customer, or offering tools to help them complete a purchase, simply isn’t enough.
Redefining The Core Tenets Of Your Business
Adopting a customer-centric approach to doing business requires a fresh approach to every stage of the customer experience, from the moment a prospective customer becomes aware of your brand, through the actual purchase, to the customer follow-up afterwards. Being customer-centric isn’t just about what you do as a business, but it’s about how your entire business is structured, which means that you may have to redefine the core tenets of your business in order to refocus on being customer-centric. While this may sound like a radical undertaking, it’s absolutely necessary in an age when customers are becoming more and more selective about what businesses they choose to engage with, and there is an entire industry of digital service providers and app designers who are creating new and innovative methods for consumers to evaluate businesses and organizations.
Boosting Your Customer Empathy
In Go Ahead. Dream Big., one of the ways that we help our attendees approach the process of developing a customer-centric approach to their businesses is through exploring the concept of customer empathy. Mastering customer empathy begins with identifying why your customers are seeking out your product or service and identifying the problems they are fulfilling. Your customers aren’t just seeking a product or service, they are seeking a solution to a problem.