A Happy Customer Is A Healthy Company: Why Customer Focus Is the Key to Sustainable Business Growth

Justin Ezor
Jul 24, 2017 · 9 min read
“All hail community focus!”

When it comes to building a sustainable business in today’s saturated digital world, developing a strong community of successful, satisfied and loyal customers is key.

Essentially, customer focus is a mindset and methodology that helps you give clients and customers the result they want (aka you’re delivering on the demand they invested in you to supply an answer for). Applying the customer focus principles to your products and programs allows you to (without much wasted time, money or energy) create valuable content, offers and services that not only sell, but convert your customers into trusted fans and friends.

Over the past three years I’ve done customer development for companies I’ve personally started, and companies I worked on for a brief time. Here are 5 key areas to focus on (and why) when you’re looking to build a thriving community of happy, successful customers:

1. Your Why & Mission:

As Simon Sinek says in his famous talk,

“Start with why.”

There’s a huge number of companies out there that forget to tell customers why they do what they do; they talk about features, benefits and a bunch of logical reasons why they’re the best choice and forget the juicy story behind their existence. Hence, they fail to create the emotional connection needed to turn customers into loyal fans and friends who are along for the ups and downs of the product development process.

Before we go out into the world and explain all our logical features & benefits, we must tell people why you created this solution for them. What you’ve seen in the marketplace and in talking to individuals like them is what inspired you to create this company, right?

If they smell that you’re out to make a quick buck, instead of providing real value to them, they’ll go running for the hills. By being founded on a mission to serve them and solve their issues, you’ll immediately hit them in the heart zone and capture their interest to learn more about your features and benefits.

2. Data Analysis:

From the moment you acquire your first customer, you should be tracking where they came from and figure out what attracted them to you. If your product has analytics capability (app or website), you should be monitoring where users come from, what actions they’re are taking, and how often. If you don’t know this information at the very least, you’re going to be flying blind when it comes to understanding your customers (and how to create more). If you have lots of data, it can be helpful to work with a skilled data-scientist to uncover and visualize trends.

On top of combing through the quantitative data (gathered from combing through your analytics and noticing trends), you should also be gathering qualitative data — following up with individuals and surveying them about their experience to learn what they love, as well as how you can increase their satisfaction. One of the easiest ways to turn casual users into devoted fans is to simply show them you care about what they think.

And a great way to position yourself for new users is to figure out why your current ones are there. There are a number of ways to do this, and my favorite is the Power User Community Group: a Facebook or Slack community group that allows your “super users” to give feedback, report issues, share ideas for improvement & make feature requests, connect with other power users, have a direct line to you and your team, and hear about new updates as they’re released. And the individual attention you can give in this setting will give your users a feeling of connection to you, your company and your mission to make their life better.

When you combine the qualitative lessons you’ll learn from these die-hard fans with the quantitative information gathered in your data analysis, you’ll propel yourself forward on your learning curve towards making a better product / service. This is how you create raving fans that keep coming back for more.

3. Retention

From the information we’ve gathered in our data analysis, we’re going to be well equipped with information about our current levels of retention (how often customers / users come back, what they’re doing and why). If we see that a certain action correlates with a more retained user, we can create a user experience that encourages all users to take that kind of action.

One of the most famous examples of this is Facebook’s “7 friends in 10 days” rule. Early on in Facebook’s rise to Unicorndom, they noticed a key trend in their most engaged users: they would add at least 7 friends in their first 10 days of being a Facebook user. There was a significant drop off in retention when users didn’t reach this level of activity.

So, being the smart cookies they are, they sent a company-wide memo stating that the focus of every department was to make sure users get to that 7 friends mark within the first 10 days of signing up — they found all kinds of ways to suggest friends, put the “people you may know” feed right below your real friend requests, and more. Since engagement with Facebook is all about having a full news feed and other people interacting with you, they just needed people to connect.

For your company, it’ll likely be a totally different metric (unless you’re a social network too) and the challenge (aka the fun part) is in discovering what makes people stick around. In all likelihood, it’s going to be the quickest set of actions that they can take to get to the real value of your product. If you can dig in and figure this out, and then guide your customers’ experience towards hitting that point, you’re helping them take action in the right direction. You’re helping them actually get the value of your product.

This can take the form of actions like setting up a powerful, personal user onboarding experience with a human, highly valuable articles about their area of interest / industry / profession, a user spotlight blog series, a tweak to your user interface (UI) making something easier to do, creating / refining your automated onboarding flow, a blog article explaining how to best get the value of your product, a beefed out FAQ list (frequently asked questions) with answers, an email e-course giving one new tip per day for the first week, weekly livestreams / webinars explaining the product and answering questions, the list goes on…

4. Re-engagment

Inevitably, there will be a number of people that sign up for your product or service, and then “churn” out of the userbase (aka go cold). They’ll just stop using your product, and you’ll be faced with a choice: to figure out why they stopped coming back and re-engage them (with push notifications, targeted advertising, emails, and one-on-one outreach), or ignore them and focus all your energy trying to dump more leads into the top of your funnel.

If your company were a bucket, the number of users who’ve churned, or went inactive, are like water leaking through the holes in your bucket. You can’t expect to have a consistently full bucket when it’s constantly draining through the bottom and sides. If you’re using your logic skills, you’ll stop filling the bucket for just a moment, patch up the holes, and then return to filling your bucket with confidence that your efforts aren’t being wasted.

If you’re picking up what I’m putting down here, you’ll know I’m a huge proponent of digging into the data, fixing the major issues, and trying to re-engage those users who’ve churned. Even if they never come back around, the process of digging through usage data, sending out surveys & reading feedback, and doing one-on-one interviews will give you a virtual gold mine of information that could literally save your business in the long term.

Almost every time, people leave because they have a less-than-awesome experience with your product / service. If we can dig in and discover what lead to that experience, we can fix it and make sure that nobody has it ever again. This way, the new users we acquire will be much more likely to be successful and therefore, happy. And we can offer our new solution to re-engage those churned users, hopefully making them happy again.

5. Referral

I love the saying that goes,

“A brand isn’t what a company says about itself. It’s what people tell their friends about that company when no-one else is listening.”

And in order to have happy customers, they have to hear about you first. That first impression really matters.

Often, a company marketing itself as the best new thing out there is brushed aside. Of course you think you’re hot $#!#. But when a friend says that this company is awesome and you need to check them out, it makes a world of difference.

When it comes to growing a name for your company, relying on paid advertising and growth-hacky marketing tactics are all good and well. But if no one is referring their friends and colleagues to you, you’re missing out on a HUGE opportunity. To encourage this action, you can add in “share” features around your UI, asking people to share with friends at the point of purchase for a discount or bonus offer, or asking people to share right when they’ve gotten the value of your product (i.e. the moment they complete a level of your game, or rate their last experience highly).

And if you’re not making an effort to track who shares you and when, you’re also missing out on key information. These are the people you want to study and understand. They are your Power Users. If you can, you should send them an honorary invite to your Power User Community Group to engage with them further.

The Power of Partnerships: In addition to asking your users to share you, if you’re not utilizing the power of partnerships (mutually beneficial alliances between you and related, but not competitive, organizations), you’re also missing out on a massive opportunity for exposure and therefore, more happy customers. When you have a well known partner helping to promote you, you’re using the law of familiarity to your advantage. Much like when a friend tells a friend to download an app, some company they know, like and trust already is giving you their badge of support. That can break down walls quick, and therefore lead to more happy customers getting the value of your product.

— — —

All in all, this list of 5 areas of focus should leave you with lots to think about. In my experience, a well rounded approach is always the best option. Hitting it from all these angles will ensure that you make people know you care about them and solving their problems.

One of my missions in life, my Why, is to help you, the founder or core team member, to better connect with and understand the people you’re working so hard to serve. With the increasing number of to-do list items that we seem to stack up in this day and age, it’s of more importance than ever to prioritize where we put our attention. There are few areas of focus more fruitful than the success of your community of users and loyal fans.

If you’re interested in exploring and integrating what I’ve written about here into your business, I’d love to connect with you! I offer a number of services that will help you turn customers into raving, die-hard fans; ranging from one-on-one coaching, to intern ‘bootcamps’ and hands-on customer development work, where I’ll get in the trenches with you to discover the spark that will set off your movement.

Whether or not we work together, I’m confident that our short, 15-20 minute conversation will open up a new perspective and provide you with massive value moving forward.

Please don’t hesitate to reach out via email at justin@lagrowthlabs.com, or you can schedule that introductory call directly into my calendar (at a time that works for you) here: bit.ly/lagljustin

Let me know your thoughts, questions and feedback in the comments below and I’ll be sure to respond to them :)

If you found this valuable, please give it a ❤ & share it with your friends / colleagues!

Justin Ezor

Written by

Startup Coach | Customer & Community Development Strategist

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