Involve your customers in your business strategy in 5 steps

Your customers are the heart of your organization. They provide the necessary tools and returns to keep the company strong. Involving your customers in the Customer success strategy is the way to develop a customer-oriented approach. At  Outreachway we thought it was valuable to ask our customers about their own challenges, prospects and tips. Feel free to read on to learn more about how they involve their customers in their customer success strategy

It is a challenge to involve your customers in every part of your organization. Reaching customers, making complaint-orientation part of the organizational culture and using customer insights within the organization are called the biggest challenges. In these five steps you will discover how to overcome these challenges.

1. Make customer engagement a top 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 customer mindset

Adopting a customer mindset can be difficult when there is a complicated customer landscape with a stark difference between customer, end user and shareholder. Other companies are more technical in nature. For them, the focus may be more on the technology or technical solutions than on the customers. Keeping the focus on your customers is the way to develop solutions that are tailored to your customers’ needs. Make sure you don’t get lost in technical solutions or difficulties and always look again at the wishes and needs of your customer. Organize customer focus from the start and relate this to the passion of your employees.

3. Look at your employee culture

The employee culture has a huge impact on the possibilities of customer integration. For the companies that are already involved in customer experience, it makes sense to come into contact with customers a lot. But for companies less oriented to customer experience, employees may need to learn new skills and gain new knowledge, even something as simple as talking to customers and understanding how to better support them. Make sure you guide your employees in the right direction.

4. Use customer data (properly) to enable customer engagement

Customer data is increasingly available. In addition to interviews, digital customer journeys lead to insights and preferences in behaviour. However, it is a challenge to make this understandable. Data by itself doesn’t provide insights to work with. You have to ask the right questions and analyze data in the right way. Make sure to combine quantitative and qualitative data for a complete picture.

5. Mobilize the organization effectively

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