At the starting of the new fiscal year, many organizations and HR managers of the organization may have certain goals related to growth. The key to fulfilling these goals lies with the customer. Understand this with an example.

In every meeting held at Amazon, one chair is left vacant to represent the presence of the customer. The company believes that the customer should always have a seat at the table because all the efforts we are making ultimately leads to customers.

Unlike many other intricate business aspects, customer obsession is simple. It only means that you have to be dedicated towards your customers, put their requirement’s first, and strive to achieve the best for their good.

However, this simple concept is often harder to implement due to its complicated nature. Though as we talk about it, customer obsession may seem like a concept of treating the customer as the ultimate decision maker. But, what we forget is that this is already true even without us making any efforts in this direction. Contrary to this understanding, customer engagement allows companies and employees to become more dedicated to their own work – their potential, capabilities, product abilities, and processes.

Hence, what do you need to become customer obsessed? Let’s understand:

Define

Firstly, understand that the customer picks you, you don’t pick the customer.

Once you have that in mind, define your customer. Now, to this, many organizations and HR managers express their concerns because they have so many customers. How is it possible to create customer obsession towards all these customers?

In reality, every business has many customers but they have a primary customer. For a freelancing platform, its primary customer is the people present on the platform, who are actively engaged. The employees of this organization need to develop an obsession towards all these people on the platform.

When you serve the primary customer in an extraordinary manner, everything else falls in place.

However, many brands confuse their target and true customer. To clear the confusion, understand that the primary customer is the one that brings you business as we saw in the case of the freelancing platform. It is not possible for the freelancing platform to decide who is a primary customer and who is not as all the people registered on the platform are the primary customers.

Listen

Once you have figured out your primary customer, listen to their needs – understand their requirements. It is possible that your customers may not want what you are offering. They may like the product but the services offered with it may not appeal to them. There are various other scenarios that can keep you behind in the race if you don’t understand customer requirements.

Hence, the simplest method to achieve this is by asking. Ask your customers what they want – create a survey, get on a call, or broadcast a social media post. Ask them about the change they would like to bring in your services and products. There will be distinct answers and you don’t even have to implement all. But, some of these responses will automatically come to the forefront and you will know which ones will increase customer engagement.

Focus

Focus on the main activities. Now, many companies feel that in this case, both focus and customer obsession aspects contradict each other or expect you to become the ultimate service provider.

The concept is often misunderstood by almost everyone. Focusing on the activities with the highest importance and looking after the requirements of the customers are two similar aspects. Take Amazon, for example. The company focuses more low-priced, speedy services. They are best at delivering what their customers need. In the quest of doing so even if they don’t provide a personalized experience, they can still drive growth.

Why?

This is because Amazon is trying to fulfil the needs of its primary customer. The primary customer wants the product at the lowest price on the next day. Amazon offers it!

Hence, it is right to say that customer obsession assumes different roles in different organizations. While personalization may not be necessary and optimal for Amazon, it would be for a company offering exclusively stitched clothes.

Alter Mindset

The key is to change your employees’ mindset and wrap it around customer obsession. You should not struggle to keep this concept alive because this aspect should automatically blend into the system. It should be so strongly ingrained in the minds of the employees that customer obsession surfaces every meeting, decision, or discussion even without employees actually realizing it.

Conclusion

When companies are more focused on their working and competitors, they strive to achieve better than others. But, what do you think about Amazon’s services? Is it necessary for Amazon to focus on other aspects? They are doing great by just focusing on the customers because eventually, everything else falls in place.

By not keeping the customer in the spotlight, we build boundaries to our work capabilities. Removing these boundaries help businesses achieve more.