
Many organisations still take a product centric approach to business…
This strategy is basically selling as many products and services to as many faceless nameless customers as possible.
When organisations ignore customer value in favour of being product obsessed, they spend their time and money on product expertise, rather than acquiring and developing high value customers.
A product centric approach can waste valuable resources on chasing down product sales to anyone and everyone, at any cost.
We should know, when we had our network of retail stores, that’s exactly what we did, and eventually changing times caught up with us, and the bottom dropped out of our business.
It wasn’t until we transformed into an office technology solutions business, and focused on helping customers with their problems, did we find a new customer centric approach to business.
Now we focus on lifetime customer value and play the long game.
It’s no longer about getting immediate sales at any cost. It’s about building relationships, understanding problems, and working out how our products and services can help fix them.
We invest heavily in building relationships over time, knowing customers will get to know and learn to trust us, which over time provides secured consistent sales.
Customer centric organisations seek to understand the common characteristics that make up it’s highest value customers, measured both in relationship and profitability.
Once these characteristics are understood customer centric organisations then go out to find and acquire other customers with similar characteristics.
Knowing who your best customers are allows your limited resources to be spent wisely on serving those customers better,
…which builds loyalty and further cements these key relationships.