Why most companies are not as customer centric as they think
Customer centricty is what most companies strive for without even knowing what it means. It is not just about how you handle the after sales services and the customer service you are offering because then you are missing out on the biggest potential there is: all the users who did not do business with you and left your website.
What is customer centricity:
Being customer centric means you care about the user experience (UX) on your website/product/service and as a result you achieve a good UX not just by chance but by listening to your audience.
You will research and work closely with customers and potential customers to understand their needs, fears, thoughts, motivations…
This information will then be used to address your audience properly, constantly improving the customer experience to find a common ground
between user and business goals — the so called sweet spot.
The big blind spot companies have:
Nowadays every company knows if they want to be successful they need to be customer centric. Customer centricity became the big topic, just like big data and personalization. All these 3 terms have one thing in common: most companies don’t even know what each of these mean and how it is done properly.
However, if you ask companies if they are customer centric most of them respond with yes and actually believe so. They send out feedback surveys to their customers and gather regular feedback from their customer service team. And they have a data scientist who looks at the data! But is that really enough?
The big blind spot you will have if you only gather feedback from your existing customers is that you miss out on all users who did not convert.
These are all the customers who did not feel in the right place when they came to your website. Or who were not sure yet because they had some open questions. People who struggled with your flow, encoutered bugs or simply didn’t see a reason to act today and then forgot about you.
Isn’t this the big potential you need to grow and increase your revenue? If we imagine that an average conversion rate is 3–5% it means that you will never learn about the 95–97% of all users who won’t do business with you because you only ask the other tiny part. What if you learned why the majority just leaves? What would be the potential to address this group better?
How do you really become customer centric and what can you learn from it:
When was the last time you have done a user lab / focus group and actually observed real users browsing your website? If the answer is never — not good.
If the answer is sometime in the last 6 months — that’s a start!
The most important part is to do user research beyond your already existing customer group. Do focus groups and user labs on a regular basis.
Invite users and observe them when they use your website to answer the following questions:
- What are they thinking? Are they missing something?
- What are they reading? Do they understand everything correctly?
- How long does it take them? What do they struggle with?
- Why would they not continue? What would they wish for?
- How could they be convinced better and what are they missing?
You will be surprised how users interact with your website. You will also be surprised what questions and thoughts they have. After all you know your product/service by heart so you won’t be able to tell if your website does a good job of convincing people.
If you do lots of testing on your page it means that the page will change often (whenever a test winner is implemented for all users). This is why you should do user research regularly. And sometimes users might just point out what they liked better about your competitors as their websites change over time as well.
This continuous research will give you many ideas for optimization and consolidate a deeper understanding of your audience. The result of this will be a higher success rate of your tests.
What you won’t learn from user research:
In the end you still need to throw in your own ideas how to convince people better.
For example: No user will ever tell you “If you increase the
fear of missing out for me, I would act immediately”.
So the knowledge and use of pyschology patterns is still something you need to deal with. And sometimes users think they want something but reality would prove them wrong. So take their ideas and wishes with a grain of salt and evaluate what to do with that feedback.
User research gives you a direction but doesn’t show you all the way — keep this in mind and keep testing!
