What Is Customer Focus? Benefits, Tips, and Examples

Customers are at the heart of every business, from purchasing the products that keep your business profitable to spreading the word about your brand. If you inquire and listen, they’ll even distribute ways to enhance your product and customer encounter.

Making your customers your top priority is called customer focus, and it’s a roadmap that can deliver results like improved customer retention and brand reputation.

What is customer focus?

Customer focus is a roadmap that involves putting customers first. You can do this by asking customers what their needs are and listening to when they respond. Once you leave down this route, it’s imperative you receive their concerns seriously, put yourself in their shoes, and assess your business decisions from a customer lens. Customer-concentrated companies actively seek ways to discover from their customers through customer feedback tools such as online surveys, user testing, social media, and review sites. They then apply insights gleaned from those sources to enhance functions ranging from marketing and customer service to product advancement.

For example, ILIA is a tidy beauty brand primarily serving an online customer base. ILIA addressed customer pain points around color-matching makeup by creating digital try-on tools on its website, including a personalized color-matching service. In 2024, the brand launched a TikTok “try on” filter to assist customers purchase the accurate color on the first try. These digital solutions resulted from thinking through the color-matching encounter from the customer’s perspective.

The outcome? Higher levels of customer satisfaction: The gift that keeps on giving. Satisfied customers are more likely to stick around and buy from you again, boosting customer retention and lowering customer buyout costs. They’re also more likely to spread the word about your products through word-of-mouth referrals, positive reviews on your website, and positive posts on social media. 

Tips for building a customer-concentrated business

• discover about your customers
• pursue up on customer feedback
• make personalized experiences
• construct a customer-concentrated business population
• back your customer-concentrated teams

Customer focus requires everyone in your business to have genuine empathy for customer concerns and tactics to assist you pinpoint what your customers desire. Here are a few tips to infuse customer-concentrated strategies throughout your business:

discover about your customers

To put customers at the center of your business, you require to discover about their desires, pain points, and motivations. Send customer surveys, inquire questions on social media, and inquire customers who have made a purchase to leave a review. Use social listening tools to discover out what customers are saying about your brand, and analyze customer data to discover about their shopping patterns. It’s also useful to have multiple types of customer feedback mechanisms—such as live gossip, email, and social media—so your spectators can reach you in the way that’s most comfortable for them.

You can also discover about your target spectators by studying your competitors’ reviews to comprehend what they’re doing correct and what opportunities are being left on the table.

pursue up on customer feedback

Once you have your customer feedback, it’s significant to respond to it promptly. Thank customers who post reviews, and engage with your online spectators. People may leave feedback in unexpected places, so consistently check your DMs, tags, and hashtags on social media in addition to your designated customer service communication channels.

If you receive negative feedback, receive action as quickly as feasible and empower your customer service throng to rectify issues such as faulty products by issuing refunds or replacements.

Keep an eye out for recurring issues, whether they’re related to product features, standard, customer service, or shipping and packaging. make channels so back teams can bring these up with relevant stakeholders. Then, work toward implementing a answer, whether that’s tweaking your website, pricing, or manufacturing processes. Customer feedback may even assist with recent product advancement.

make personalized experiences

Customers desire to feel like they’re being cared for—like their period and business matter. Use a customer connection management structure to save customer data and interactions so they don’t have to input it multiple times or repeat themselves when speaking to customer service.

You can also use product recommendation engines to provide users personalized suggestions and make spectators segments to target potential customers with the information they’re most likely to discover valuable. For example, you may send different email marketing campaigns about your sports apparel to customers depending on where they live, their age, and what they’ve bought before.

construct a customer-concentrated business population

Customer focus is most effective when it’s in the fabric of a business. receive period to celebrate customer wins with your throng, whether it’s reaching a recent sales objective or landing a particularly significant client. Incorporate customer stories and feedback into internal communications including town halls and annual reports, and insist that the entire business talk about customers respectfully.

To construct a customer-concentrated population, weigh your decisions against how they will impact your consumers, and ponder of events, giveaways, and other ways in which you can make customer delight. Work toward creating an accessible website so you can meet the needs of customers with disabilities.

If your organization has the bandwidth, you may choose to hire a chief customer officer, who works toward creating a powerful customer focus across departments.

back your customer-concentrated teams

A customer-centric roadmap requires exceptional customer service, and this means empowering your customer service providers with the tools they require to achieve. construct in period for regular customer service training, including training for energetic listening, customer empathy, and obvious communication. Make sure they comprehend business policies regarding refunds and returns and have obvious pathways set out for throng members to issue those.

Sales and social media teams often interact with existing and potential customers, so provide them with the requisite tools and training as well. Ensure they’re using your brand voice and a professional and respectful tone when communicating externally—and that they’re up-to-date with all relevant business policies.

Examples of successful customer-concentrated businesses

1. Mad Rabbit
2. August
3. Lulu’s

Here are three examples of very different businesses with effective customer-concentrated strategies:

1. Mad Rabbit

Mad Rabbit is a direct-to-customer tattoo aftercare brand founded by Selom Agbitor and Oliver Zak. As a direct-to-customer (D2C) business, customer focus was essential to its achievement. As Selom says on an episode of the Shopify Masters podcast, “The key to being successful is testing and making sure that whatever you’re putting out, your spectators can resonate and engage with it.” Mad Rabbit employed testing and feedback to iterate on its products, ensuring it had customer buy-in before taking costly steps like investing in product materials and paid advertising.

2. August

Period worry business August was born out of customer research. On an episode of Shopify Masters, co-founder Nadya Okamoto describes August as “a business that does everything as inspired by our throng.” Before launching August, Nadya held throng conversations with potential customers to comprehend what they wanted and took the period to construct the business’s offerings and way to prioritize the needs of their customer throng over all else.

“We were talking to thousands of people to comprehend what their imagination is for menstrual ownership, better period worry, more transparent period worry,” Nadya explains.

3. Lulu’s

Crystal Landsem, CEO of the fashion brand Lulu’s, has a obvious customer-concentrated schedule. “If it doesn’t drive worth to your customer, you don’t require it,” she says on a Shopify Masters episode. Lulu’s has been in business for more than 25 years and expanded from ecommerce to brick-and-mortar stores—a request that came straight from customers.

“The way that we run our operating schedule is very test-and-discover, and it’s the most efficient, low-waste way to buy product, listen to customer feedback, and make deeper investments in the product that works,” Crystal says. Customer focus has driven Lulu’s procurement, expansion, and retention strategies, making it the 10-figure fashion brand that it is today.