What it means to be customer-obsessed

What Is Customer Obsession?

Being customer obsessed is all about hyper-focusing on creating a phenomenal customer experience. Customer obsession takes being customer-first to the next level by making the brand’s audience the brand’s primary focus.

Organizations that are customer-obsessed are constantly looking for ways to enrich the buying experience for their customers. At every step of the sales and onboarding process, businesses craft an approach that centers around the customers’ wants and needs. The primary difference between general customer experience (CX) and customer obsession is that while most businesses create a positive experience, customer-obsessed companies put the customers at the center of their entire business model.

When you create a culture of customer obsession, you increase customer loyalty and encourage new leads to jump on the bandwagon.

Examples of Customer-Obsessed Businesses

Amazon

One of the most successful companies globally is Amazon, and Jeff Bezos attributes the company’s rise to the top to its four fundamental values. At the top of the list: customer obsession. Rather than being “competitor obsessed,” Bezos says that successful companies need to focus on their customers’ needs. He claims there is a significant distinction between being competitor-focused and customer-focused. No matter the size of your company, Amazon demonstrates that customer obsession is a top-down affair, meaning that every employee should have the customers’ best interest at heart.

Disney

Anyone who’s been to a Disney Park has felt special because Disney is the master of being customer-obsessed. In fact, when Walt Disney first opened Disneyland, he hired someone to count how many steps people would go before just throwing their trash on the ground. The person found that thirty feet was the longest distance people would go, and now there’s a trashcan every thirty feet in Disney parks. Rather than hiring someone to pick up after people, Disney went so far as to deduce the best ways to provide his visitors with a trash can whenever they need one. This is just one of a million examples of how Disney is a customer-obsessed enterprise.

Slack

The internal messaging software makes it easy for teams to collaborate, but Slack’s platform is extremely customizable. When you log into your Slack account for the first time, you’re met with a personalized onboarding module tailored by the management team and complete with a customized message and a tour of the platform. Slack understands that its users are business people who need to be able to strike while the iron is hot, so they enable real-time notifications on desktop and mobile apps. These notifications allow the brand reps to jump on a lead and close the deal without moving to a different application.

Birchbox

Birchbox is one of the world’s largest beauty and grooming subscription services, and they pride themselves on giving their customers a “personalized, white-glove experience.” The company successfully navigates its customer-obsessed approach by constantly analyzing collected data. They look at key performance indicators (KPIs) such as support requests, customer feedback or ratings, and agent performance and ratings. Quantifiable data and statistics enable Birchbox to provide a phenomenal product that makes its subscribers feel like they knew exactly what they were looking for.

ServiceNow

ServiceNow is a great example of customer obsession in a B2B context. The organization believes that technology exists in the service of people and operates with a singular focus on customer success. One of the fundamentals of customer obsession is learning everything you possibly can about your customer so that they don't have to educate you, you're already up to speed so you can be a partner in creating value. Especially in a B2B setting, that's hard because there is so much information about large enterprises, and things are changing every day. In 2020, ServiceNow announced how they’re evolving their go-to-market functions to drive deeper customer success and engagement and to build an even more exceptional partner ecosystem. They are a great example of how to embed customer obsession into your business strategy. 

Principles of Customer Obsession

There are two primary principles of customer-obsessed businesses: customer engagement and employee engagement.

1. Customer Engagement

It’s no surprise that one of the cornerstones of customer obsession is audience engagement. Customer obsession is nothing if not understanding your clientele and creating value for them.

Customer engagement takes on many forms, such as:

• Gathering feedback and actively considering it
• Focusing on what the customer would benefit from
• Speaking to customers’ pain points and being empathetic indirect interactions
• Delivering potential solutions to any problem that may arise

2. Employee Engagement

Ensuring customer obsession starts with engaging your employees. As the people who often directly interact with your customers, you must take care of your employees’ needs as much as your customers’.

Employee engagement looks like:

• Providing excellent and efficient onboarding
• Giving your workers ample opportunities to rise in their career
• Having a clear pipeline to management for voicing any concerns
• Listening to any concerns brought up
• Offering mentorship for continual growth
• Recognizing phenomenal work
• Performing compassionate quality assessments

Employee engagement is every bit as crucial to customer obsession as customer engagement because it helps your team perform better, be more productive, understand the company culture, and stay with your company longer.

Qualities of a Customer-Obsessed Company

As you work to tweak your business model to make your brand more customer-obsessed, the values you’ll want to include are:

• Empathy – understanding your customers’ needs and, when possible, experiencing things from their point of view
• Respect – being kind when talking to customers and providing quick service, as if you’re helping a close friend or family member
• Simplicity – making your sales funnel as seamless as possible for your customers
• Communication – providing clear and concise updates about where you’re at on your end of things, so the customer isn’t left waiting
• Retention – focusing on keeping the customers you have rather than only trying to get new people to convert
• Analyzation – reviewing feedback and data to see how you can continue to make your company a better environment for your customers

Three easy steps to jump-start customer obsession in your business

Step 1: Internal redevelopment

As you work to create a customer-obsessed environment, you have to start internally. Before you even think about customer engagement, you have to begin with employee engagement. You can call a team meeting and discuss some of the hardest parts of engaging with your audience. If your employees say that it’s difficult to convert customers because of X, see if there’s a way to fix it.

The most important thing you can do is lead by example. If your employees see that you are making an effort to be customer-focused, then they’ll follow suit.

As you add new members to the team, you’ll focus on finding quality people who share your company’s values and train them for the long term.

Step 2: External redevelopment

Now that your staff is customer-obsessed, your team can work together to improve your customers’ experience. You can get their feedback and brainstorm ways to meet their needs.

Step 3: Enablement with the right tools

As you’ve probably guessed, customer obsession is all about listening, learning, and evolving. The best way to tackle all of this is to have the right tools at your disposal for gathering and analyzing data.

ModuleQ provides the software you need to bring your brand up to the level of customer obsession you want to be at. Learn more here and start your free demo today to see how ModuleQ can revolutionize your business.