Time for a gut check...how’s your core?

What do you think of when I say core?

I’m talking about the core of your business. How is your core?

What is your core? That is really where you need to start. 

Identifying your core is vital to building a successful business. Often companies start out with a product or service that they are sure customers need, they start marketing and selling the product and their business takes off!

(I am definitely oversimplifying this process…just bear with me!)

At some point, the company grows and needs to add more people…so they hire more employees to do the work of growing the business!

With growth comes the need for process, systems and some semblance of a manifesto for how everyone will work together to continue to grow the business!

You are now on the road to developing a company culture! Congratulations, you’ve made it! You’ve arrived! You are now able to sit at the grown-up table.

Then it happens, the company begins to hit a growth trajectory that moves it from a startup of family, friends are raving fans…it now moves into the stage where customers start to expect more. They expect more from you, from your products and from your service. And most businesses do exactly what is expected… “everything it can to achieve customer obsession and customer delight to drive revenue and keep the company moving forward.”

Hear me out, there is nothing wrong with being obsessed with customer service or customer success BUT it shouldn’t start when things start to break down (because they will), it has to start with the product or service being offered.

I have seen this so many times, with so many startups and small businesses: customers become unhappy because their expectations aren’t met and so the company goes into “fix it” mode, trying to fix the problem with the customer. 

Think of the time, effort and energy spent to help the customer keep something they don’t want. This time, effort and energy directly impact the bottom line. Think of the resources used to retain customers who are dissatisfied with the product or service they received because the expectation of what they were sold doesn’t match the reality of what they experienced.

The meetings to figure out what went wrongThe free offerings to make the customer happyThe discounts offered to hope they come back and purchase againThe involvement of staff at all levelsThe negative word of mouth marketing from the customerThe PR efforts to regain the customer’s trust in the company

That’s a huge toll on company profits and all the while these efforts focus on fixing something that should probably have never been broken, to begin with.

The mistake businesses make is that they incorrectly assume that the responsibility to fix what’s broken this lies within the customer success organization, when in fact it should be a collaboration of departments and a leveraging of the power core of the business; Sales and Marketing, Operations and Logistics and Customer Support and Retention.

True “customer obsession” takes place when there is a “locking of arms” with the power core in order to better understand why the expectations of the customer are not being met and then create a plan to fix it. 

The fix comes by meeting the “customer expectations” and those expectations are the following “core elements of the business”:

Value Proposition
Market Presence
Customer Promise

Customer obsession is the glue that brings these all together.

Think about it, if the product team is successful at creating products that match the value proposition, then content and marketing can create an authentic marketplace presence to attract new and existing customers and the sales and service teams can deliver on the customer promise.

If you find yourself in the stage of business where you feel that everything is broken and your spending too much time, effort and energy trying to win back customers that aren’t happy with your product or service…I recommend that you take a step back and check out your core.

Something at the core could be broken. 

Demonstrate customer obsession by bringing the stakeholders together, getting to the core of the problem and creating a fix that truly benefits the customer and meets their expectations.