Is Your Website Customer Focused or Self Centred?

It is an easy phrase to say and it is quoted frequently: “Be Customer Focused” – but not everyone REALLY takes notice of it, or applies effectively.

Many companies THINK they are customer focused however an awful lot of the time they end up paying lip service to themselves. Yet being truly customer focused is a very powerful way to win and keep customers. Especially online.

Selling is Easy!

The concept of selling is simple – you simply ask customers what they want to buy and you sell it to them. And whilst that, in essence, is true, it opens up the door to further deeper questions: What customers? Where are they? Where do you find them? How do you reach them? What is the best way to communicate with them? What are their financial circumstances? How do they like to pay? Who else is selling to them? In what way are our products better than our competition? …and so on.

Many of the questions can be answered by the same answer: “Customers will find us online via our website and buy from us”. And it is a universal truth that the Internet is a superb medium for expertly matching consumers to products, clients to solutions and buyers to things they want to buy.

But if you THINK like your target customers and REALLY do the research, you can ensure your website is fully designed and superbly optimised to deliver what the target customer EXPECTS to see when they land on your web page. It looks and feels like a meeting of minds between vendor and consumer when your website walks the walk and talks the talk in the target sector. Only when that happens, can huge success follow!

The first rule of sales is, “Make it easy for the customer to buy” – and one of the best in the business at online sales is Amazon. The entire purchasing experience on Amazon is highly professional and streamlined from start to finish. By and large, it really is a masterclass example of how to get the Internet right (we add 'by and large' as pinch of salt because lets face it, nobody's perfect). There are not many better at being customer focused; from the search, to buy, to pay, to delivery – every single step of the experience is optimised.

When was the last time you bought from yourself?

When was the last time you tried to buy something from your own company? Or asked a trusted friend to buy something and report back to you on what they experienced? The surprising answer is that very few people ever try to buy from themselves or to assess their own customer’s online experience. Also, few take the time to properly analyse customer feedback or survey new customers to find out how they may improve their online service.

By being TRULY customer focused, by asking these important questions and by working with your digital marketing agency you can transform your online sales results. If you seamlessly build in what the customer most expects and wants to see, in the way they want to see it, you will begin to reap the benefits of a powerful, well designed and truly customer focused website.