The first thing a customer-centric brand should do

You are launching your own brand. Great! You want it to fill a gap in the market and want it to become a lovemark.

You know that to get there you need to be a customer-centric brand to the bone because modern brands cannot afford to have anything else as their number one priority but customers.

This is something we can help with. High-impact services like the ones at https://www.updigital.ca are ready to increase your bottom line and will help you handle the heavy day to day tasks of growing your online presence.

What does it mean to be customer-centric business?

For ecommerce brands, customer-centric approach means putting the customer first and making the customer experience the top objective. Customer centricity can be called a strategy since it’s not how all companies choose to do things, it’s not the default. 

Customer focus will impact your:

• customer service
• product development and manufacturing
• marketing and partnerships
• expansion plans
• pricing strategy
• basically, all aspects of the business.

The first step to becoming a customer-centric company

Launching your brand, there’s a high chance to get overwhelmed with all operational stuff and forget about your long-term vision.

This often means missing the vital first interactions with customers – the first customers are enormously important as they find you while you’re still not well-known, they trust you on no evidence and are early adopters of your products.

This is like going out on a stage with your eyes closed. How do you know things are working?

That’s why we recommend setting up for collecting customer feedback as soon as you launch. It’s the way to move forward – once you’ve realize your ideas, it’s the time for your loyal customers to have their say since selling goes both ways.

A customer-centric brand moves in the direction its customers want and feedback is the compass.

What customer feedback gives you

Your customers’ opinions are a key to improving the brand you’ve launched and making even better and ultimately successful.

Read more: $100 million worth brand Native started out with a feedback loop

• Negative feedback is direct so you can fix issues in customer experience fast and make clients happy.
• You’ll get ideas for improvement of the product, new variants, additional features.
• Insights into product use will give you ideas for marketing e.g. different purposes.
• Customer words make great social proof and help you get SEO right. Learn more about it here.
• Early adopters can easily become brand ambassadors. You can hire them either as influencers or as part of the team. When hiring the right people for the job, make sure to conduct employment verification and background checks.

And as a bonus, people like being involved, their opinions listened to. It makes them feel important and ties them to the brand they feel they have a stake in. Listening to feedback stimulates customer loyalty.

Read more: How to use customer feedback to your advantage

Ways to gather customer feedback

On-site rankings, pop-ups, embedded forms – they all require some changes on your site and very often – customer’s details to be displayed publicly, which does not sound great for privacy reasons. Plus, you’re still building the brand so negative reviews (bound to happen) won’t help.

But you’ve probably invested a lot in your website because it’s the face of your brand so we won’t make it complicated for you.

The easiest way to start collecting customer feedback is via email – just ask and store the answers/ scores. If you decide to use a review as social proof, ask the customer for permission first.