Customers are at the heart of every business, from purchasing the products that keep your business profitable to spreading the word about your brand. If you ask and listen, they’ll even share ways to improve your product and customer experience.
Making your customers your top priority is called customer focus, and it’s a business strategy that can deliver results like improved customer retention and brand reputation.
What is customer focus?
Customer focus is a business strategy that involves putting customers first. You can do this by asking customers what their needs are and listening to when they respond. Once you go down this route, it’s imperative you take their concerns seriously, put yourself in their shoes, and evaluate your business decisions from a consumer lens. Customer-focused companies actively seek ways to learn from their customers through customer feedback tools such as online surveys, user testing, social media, and review sites. They then apply insights gleaned from those sources to improve functions ranging from marketing and customer service to product development.
For example, ILIA is a clean beauty brand primarily serving an online customer base. ILIA addressed customer pain points around color-matching makeup by creating digital try-on tools on its website, including a personalized color-matching service. In 2024, the brand launched a TikTok “try on” filter to help customers purchase the accurate color on the first try. These digital solutions resulted from thinking through the color-matching experience from the consumer’s perspective.
The result? Higher levels of customer satisfaction: The gift that keeps on giving. Satisfied customers are more likely to stick around and buy from you again, boosting customer retention and lowering customer acquisition costs. They’re also more likely to spread the word about your products through word-of-mouth referrals, positive reviews on your website, and positive posts on social media.
Tips for building a customer-focused business
- Learn about your customers
- Follow up on customer feedback
- Create personalized experiences
- Build a customer-focused company culture
- Support your customer-focused teams
Customer focus requires everyone in your business to have genuine empathy for customer concerns and tactics to help you pinpoint what your customers want. Here are a few tips to infuse customer-focused strategies throughout your business:
Learn about your customers
To put customers at the center of your business, you need to learn about their desires, pain points, and motivations. Send customer surveys, ask questions on social media, and ask customers who have made a purchase to leave a review. Use social listening tools to find out what customers are saying about your brand, and analyze customer data to learn about their shopping patterns. It’s also useful to have multiple types of customer feedback mechanisms—such as live chat, email, and social media—so your audience can reach you in the way that’s most comfortable for them.
You can also learn about your target audience by studying your competitors’ reviews to understand what they’re doing right and what opportunities are being left on the table.
Follow up on customer feedback
Once you have your customer feedback, it’s important to respond to it promptly. Thank customers who post reviews, and engage with your online audience. People may leave feedback in unexpected places, so consistently check your DMs, tags, and hashtags on social media in addition to your designated customer service communication channels.
If you receive negative feedback, take action as quickly as possible and empower your customer service team to rectify issues such as faulty products by issuing refunds or replacements.
Keep an eye out for recurring issues, whether they’re related to product features, quality, customer service, or shipping and packaging. Create channels so support teams can bring these up with relevant stakeholders. Then, work toward implementing a solution, whether that’s tweaking your website, pricing, or manufacturing processes. Customer feedback may even help with new product development.
Create personalized experiences
Customers want to feel like they’re being cared for—like their time and business matter. Use a customer relationship management system to save customer data and interactions so they don’t have to input it multiple times or repeat themselves when speaking to customer service.
You can also use product recommendation engines to give users personalized suggestions and create audience segments to target potential customers with the information they’re most likely to find valuable. For example, you may send different email marketing campaigns about your sports apparel to customers depending on where they live, their age, and what they’ve bought before.
Build a customer-focused company culture
Customer focus is most effective when it’s in the fabric of a company. Take time to celebrate customer wins with your team, whether it’s reaching a new sales goal or landing a particularly important client. Incorporate customer stories and feedback into internal communications including town halls and annual reports, and insist that the entire company speak about customers respectfully.
To build a customer-focused culture, weigh your decisions against how they will impact your consumers, and think of events, giveaways, and other ways in which you can create customer delight. Work toward creating an accessible website so you can meet the needs of customers with disabilities.
If your organization has the bandwidth, you may choose to hire a chief customer officer, who works toward creating a strong customer focus across departments.
Support your customer-focused teams
A customer-centric business strategy requires exceptional customer service, and this means empowering your customer service providers with the tools they need to succeed. Build in time for regular customer service training, including training for active listening, customer empathy, and clear communication. Make sure they understand company policies regarding refunds and returns and have clear pathways set out for team members to issue those.
Sales and social media teams often interact with existing and potential customers, so provide them with the requisite tools and training as well. Ensure they’re using your brand voice and a professional and respectful tone when communicating externally—and that they’re up-to-date with all relevant company policies.
Examples of successful customer-focused businesses
Here are three examples of very different businesses with effective customer-focused strategies:
1. Mad Rabbit
Mad Rabbit is a direct-to-consumer tattoo aftercare brand founded by Selom Agbitor and Oliver Zak. As a direct-to-consumer (D2C) company, customer focus was essential to its success. As Selom says on an episode of the Shopify Masters podcast, “The key to being successful is testing and making sure that whatever you’re putting out, your audience can resonate and engage with it.” Mad Rabbit employed testing and feedback to iterate on its products, ensuring it had customer buy-in before taking costly steps like investing in product materials and paid advertising.
2. August
Period care company August was born out of customer research. On an episode of Shopify Masters, co-founder Nadya Okamoto describes August as “a business that does everything as inspired by our community.” Before launching August, Nadya held community conversations with potential customers to understand what they wanted and took the time to build the company’s offerings and approach to prioritize the needs of their customer community over all else.
“We were talking to thousands of people to understand what their vision is for menstrual equity, better period care, more transparent period care,” Nadya explains.
3. Lulu’s
Crystal Landsem, CEO of the fashion brand Lulu’s, has a clear customer-focused strategy. “If it doesn’t drive value to your customer, you don’t need it,” she says on a Shopify Masters episode. Lulu’s has been in business for more than 25 years and expanded from ecommerce to brick-and-mortar stores—a request that came straight from customers.
“The way that we run our business model is very test-and-learn, and it’s the most efficient, low-waste way to buy product, listen to customer feedback, and make deeper investments in the product that works,” Crystal says. Customer focus has driven Lulu’s procurement, expansion, and retention strategies, making it the 10-figure fashion brand that it is today.
Customer focus FAQ
What is the goal of customer focus?
The goal of customer focus is to let customer needs drive your business decisions and culture in order to boost customer loyalty, satisfaction, and retention. This strategy places customer experience at the center of the business, making relationships and trust the key business drivers.
What should be included in a customer-focused strategy?
A customer-focused business strategy should infuse the customer perspective throughout all business decisions. This can include investing in software tools that help you learn about your customers and respond to their needs quickly and investing in training your customer-facing employees so they can solve pain points and create a smooth and satisfying customer experience.
How do you build a customer-focused brand?
Customer focus means you’re putting customers first. To improve customer focus, listen to feedback and complaints, act on it appropriately, train your customer service teams, and cultivate a customer-focused company culture.
