Customer Obsession Leads to Revenue for B2B SaaS Companies

When many people hear the phrase “customer obsession,” they imagine it refers to a buyer who is mightily taken with a brand. And it’s true that as consumers, we love our Coca-Cola, Epson printers, and Wilson volleyballs.

Yet we need to flip the idea of customer loyalty. To become customer-obsessed companies, we must first become obsessed with customer needs. At the risk of saying “customer” too often, the goal should be to craft a customer-obsessed culture whose customer-centric activities are all based on precisely what they need, not on what we want from them.

This is equally true whether you’re a retailer, a SaaS provider, or anything else. From social media campaigns to support desk services, prioritizing people will reduce churn, increase customer retention, and create better profit margins.

So, how can you increase your customer focus and see those results? That’s precisely what we’re here to talk about today. Let’s look at what customer obsession is, how it helps achieve business goals and bolster revenue, and the six steps you can take to get there today.

What is Customer Obsession?

In a nutshell, customer obsession means prioritizing customer satisfaction from the first moment they encounter your company. They should get value from that initial social post, podcast, or blog deep dive. You must continue to meet customer expectations through the buyer’s journey, until the point of sale, but also afterward – when they become dedicated subscribers to your service or product users.

True customer obsession stems not from halfhearted efforts to boost your support services or tinker with your website’s UX. Each loyal customer you earn results from full-scale effort throughout the buyer journey and across departments.

Customer obsession means a genuine shift in your company culture from being purely competitor focused – “How can we beat out the competition?” – to becoming a customer-obsessed brand.

“Customer obsession is a whole-scale shift in how businesses think and operate,” according to Forrester research. “It doesn’t just happen when well-intentioned businesses are nicer to customers — or even when they reduce the friction of customer experiences. Customer obsession pivots the vision a company is working toward, how it works, and even the primary value it brings to its market, partners, employees, and customers.”

It’s a significant shift, and unfortunately, it does take effort. But it sure is worth it.

What Business Goals Can a Customer-Obsessed Culture Achieve?

So, just what does valuing your buyers and users above all else help you do? Here are just a few of those most important benefits:

• A loyal customer base: Every company wants to increase the number of people buying their products, and customer obsession helps you do that.
• More new customers: When you create better content to guide and treat customers as more valued at every stage, other people hear about it.
• Revenue growth: Loyal customers + new customers is a simple equation for growing your revenue.
• A better NPS score: Your net promoter score dictates whether people will actively detract from or add to your brand; customer obsession will help you boost it.
• Higher employee engagement: Employees who don’t get yelled at like their jobs better. Happier customers mean happier employees.

How Does Customer Focus and Obsession Lead to Revenue?

Focusing on metrics is only natural. You (and your bosses) want to ensure that you’re hitting each benchmark and making real-time strides toward achieving the goals of your e-commerce initiatives. Therefore, many decision-makers want to know precisely how improving the customer experience will lead to profits.

It’s really pretty simple: most people equate being appreciated with a feeling of safety. They know they have less to worry about if someone else values them. They believe that companies that treat them as more than a customer data point will continue to meet their needs. When they have that faith, you gain:

• More upsells and cross-sells
• Greater benefit of the doubt from users, who are likelier to give you a chance to make things right before leaving
• Increased word-of-mouth marketing
• Better returns on your surveys, which leads to valuable decision-making data

In other words, service providers seeking to create a customer journey with satisfaction at every step will enjoy greater profits.

6 Steps for Becoming a Customer-Obsessed Company

If Amazon and Jeff Bezos have taught us anything, you form deep and lasting customer relationships when you prioritize customer interactions above all else. These relationships can withstand some pretty rough waters, too.

From Amazon’s lousy press to its failed drone experiments, most Americans still use it to purchase goods – and there’s a reason for that. Amazon’s customer obsession strategy is built on fast shipping, tons of choice, an excellent user interface, and good customer support with frequently granted refunds.

Most entrepreneurs can’t count on a groundbreaking algorithm, however. Because of that, product teams have to rely on more restrained marketing strategies. That doesn’t mean, though, that your team members can’t refine those strategies with considerable success.

If you want to become customer-obsessed, here are six steps to help you get there.

1. Understand Your Audience(s)

First and foremost, customer obsession means knowing who you’re marketing to. Only then can you send messages they’re guaranteed to receive.

There are several avenues for figuring this out, including competitor research, customer surveys, and internal surveys. What do they want? What are their pain points? What has frustrated them about the last solution they tried? Answering these questions – and genuinely caring about the answers – is the first step in becoming a customer-obsessed brand.

Note that most companies have more than one audience. Even if those audiences are similar, you’ll want to bucket them separately to ensure the best possible marketing strategy to reach them individually.

2. Consolidate Insights Re: The Customer Journey

It’s not enough to find out what your audience likes and call it good. Customer obsession requires an intentional script about what people want, why, when, where, and how.

If you don’t know where people get hung up on a software product, for instance, then you can never train them effectively to use yours. Consolidating customer journey insights helps you improve customer success by knowing exactly where to focus your training efforts.

The good news is that it's like magic when you focus in the right place. Suddenly they’re happy, scaling up the use of your product, mentioning it to others, and ensuring your profits soar.

3. De-Silo Your Organization

Too often, though, organizations get stuck when they nail a customer obsession strategy for one department but neglect to do it in others.

For instance, many companies have great marketing. But all the beautiful social media feeds, omnichannel messaging, and pre-sale customer education in the world can’t save you from a ticked-off buyer if you don’t support them after the sale.

If you genuinely want to reduce churn and steadily increase profits, you must ensure that every department understands the strategy. That means de-siloing marketing, sales, support, and anyone else critical to your customer success.

4. Commit to Customers as THE Priority

It’s not enough to commit to customers as A priority. If you’re not treating them like THE priority, you’ve already failed to understand the root of customer obsession: that there is no competing (and undoubtedly no higher) good.

Boards, shareholders, partners, and vendors will all demand their pound of flesh. That’s as certain as death and taxes. Before you give it, you must ensure you’ve taken care of your audience’s needs. Otherwise, they’ll leave, and you’ll never even have a chance to satisfy everyone else.

5. Implement Rewards Programs

Rewards programs make customers feel loved. They also show people who haven’t yet committed to you how much you’ll commit to them if they give you the chance.

Make sure to design rewards that actually give back, however. Too many loyalty programs are thinly veiled attempts to keep buyers at the table without actually giving them a reason to stay. Be generous, and you’ll get repaid generously yourself.

6. Cultivate Customer-Obsessed Leaders

You can bang on about customer obsession all you want, but it won't amount to much if it’s not a top-down strategy.

When hiring, look for managers and C-suite members who care about customers to their core. They should eat, sleep, and breathe the question, “What does the customer want?” Every product you release and every initiative you implement should stem from this simple question, so your leaders must keep that question at the forefront.

That means they also need familiarity with tools that enable customer obsession. Marketing apps, employee training, and customer education all play in – especially that last one.

Obsessed With Your Customers? Show Them With Raven360

If you genuinely want to bring customer obsession to the forefront of your operations and mindset, it’s time to change how you do business. You must give customers a reason to love you right out of the gate before you even start selling, cross-selling, upselling … or really any kind of selling.

Educating your audience is the absolute best way to start. When they feel they’re getting something, they’re far likelier to give you their time, attention, and money. Many companies have found that implementing a training program for their customers is just as valuable as doing so for their employees and stakeholders.

If you’d like to learn more about how such a program works, we invite you to reach out and request a Raven360 demo today!