Consumer sovereignty is a principle of Austrian economics. Here’s how entrepreneurs apply the principle in business, as told by Martin Lünendonk, co-founder of FounderJar.com, as well as Finance Club and Cleverism.com.

Key Takeaways & Actionable Insights

“There is only one boss. The customer. And he can fire everybody in the company, from the chairman on down, simply by spending his money somewhere else.” —Sam Walton

Though they are several decades old, these words by Walmart founder Sam Walton are still very relevant, especially in today’s highly competitive world.

This is particularly true for those trying to make money online. You are already in competition with hundreds, perhaps thousands of other businesses, and if you do not put your customers first, they can easily move to the competition. It’s as easy as tapping a few buttons on their smartphone.

Great business leaders understand that businesses exist for one sole purpose — to serve the needs of their customers. If you want your business to not only survive, but to thrive in this hyper-competitive world, it’s time you started treating your customers like the boss.

Below, let’s take a look at the steps you need to take to place your customers in their rightful seat — the boss’s seat.

1. Identify the Key Problems Customers Want To Get Solved

To effectively serve your customers, you need to first identify what key problems the customer is trying to solve.

Very often, entrepreneurs set out to solve problems they think the customer has, without trying to look at things from the customers’ point of view and confirm whether the customer has this problem, and whether it is a problem they are trying to solve.

For instance, Blackberry assumed that what its customers wanted was a laptop that could fit on the palm, so they focused on improving the physical keyboard.

Apple, on the other hand, realized that what customers actually wanted was a device that was amazingly easy to use, and when they introduced a device with a touch screen and no physical buttons, they took Blackberry out of business.

So, how do you identify the problems that customers are trying to solve? There are two ways to do this:

Listen To Your Customers

The easiest way to identify the problems your customers are trying to solve is to actually listen to them. They know what they are struggling with and why they need this problem solved.

If you listen to your customers, you are unlikely to find yourself in a situation where you are solving a problem no one cares about.

There are two main approaches you can take to listen to your customers and identify the problems they are trying to solve. Here are a few…

• Interview your customers: Your first option is to get proactive and ask the customers directly. You can do this using surveys on your website, by getting on the phone and talking to customers, through focus groups, and so on.
• Look at customer reviews: Your customer reviews present another great opportunity for you to learn about the problems your customers are trying to solve. Here, you should place more focus on the negative comments, since these are the ones that highlight customer needs that are not being met. However, even positive comments can give insights into customer problems that you’re solving effectively.

Listen To Your Salespeople

The second approach to identifying the problems customers are trying to solve is to listen to your salespeople.

Your salespeople are in direct contact with your customers, and they, therefore, have better insights into your customers’ thought processes.

They know the pain points that drive customers to purchase your products and services, they know the things that customers like or dislike about your products, they know the reasons that keep some customers from purchasing, and so on.

By administering surveys to your sales teams, you can gain insights that will help you figure out your customers’ key problems, which will in turn help you to serve them better.

When trying to gain insights about customer problems, either from the customers themselves or from your salespeople, it’s good to try to get to the root cause of the problem. Sometimes, what you think is the problem might not actually be the problem.

For instance, at one point, Disney was experiencing lots of criticism because visitors felt the queues for the rides were too long. At first glance, the problem seems obvious – visitors spending too much time waiting for their rides.

The solutions to this problem are obvious as well. To shorten the queues, Disney would either have to invest in more rides, or reduce the number of visitors getting into their parks. Both of these solutions would cost Disney millions.

Disney hired a group of designers to help them solve this problem. After interviews with Disney visitors, the designers realized that the problem wasn’t the long queues. The problem was that visitors were getting bored because they had nothing to do while waiting in the queue.

To solve the problem, they had Disney add themed music and videos that visitors could listen to and watch while waiting for their rides. By getting to the root cause of the problem, they were able to come up with an effective solution that saved Disney millions.

Similarly, do not take your customers’ feedback at face value. Try to identify what the root problem is before you start developing a solution.

2. Make Sure Your Offering Solves Those Customer Problems

Now that you have identified the problems that your customers are trying to solve, it’s time to come up with solutions to solve those problems.

The best way to ensure that the solution you are developing solves the actual problems your customers are struggling with is to involve your customers in the development process.

One approach is to develop a minimum viable product (MVP) of your solution and show it to a group of customers with the problem you are trying to solve. You then collect their feedback, and use insights to improve your next iteration and ensure that your final solution solves the customer problem in the most effective way.

For instance, when creating DropBox, founder Drew Houston didn’t want to spend months, perhaps years, working on a product that no one was interested in, so he started with an MVP.

Drew’s MVP was a simple 3-minute video demonstrating how his product was meant to work. He shared the video on Digg, an online community of technology early adopters.

After sharing his video, over 70,000 people joined the DropBox beta waiting list within a single night, which was enough validation that his product was solving the right problem.

Another way to involve customers in the development of your solution is to form a small community of beta testers and give them access to your solution during the development process.

This works even if you are developing a service-based product. For instance, if you are a digital marketing consultant, you could create a package — say a content marketing package — and test it among a small group of customers before you launch it in full scale.

The aim here is to have a group of actual customers continually testing the solution you are developing to make sure that it addresses their key concerns in the best possible manner for them.

This way, you don’t have to worry about spending months or years coming up with a solution to your customers’ problems, only to discover that it is not the kind of solution they were looking for.

Another way to ensure that what you are offering solves your customers’ actual problems is to conduct A/B tests. This basically involves creating two versions of your offering, giving two small groups of customers access to each version, and then tracking the results to identify the version that solves customers’ most effectively.

3. Track Customer Satisfaction

Ultimately, what matters is keeping your customers satisfied. If your boss is unsatisfied with your work, you can bet that you will be out of work soon.

Similarly, if your customers are unsatisfied with your business, they will fire you – by spending their money on your competitors.

Actually, while 96% of unhappy customers will not voice their dissatisfaction, 91% of them will never make another purchase from you. This is definitely something you don’t want.

To know whether your customers are happy, you need a way to track and measure customer satisfaction. Here are five of the most effective ways of measuring customer satisfaction:

Customer Satisfaction Surveys

This is one of the easiest ways of tracking customer satisfaction. With this approach, you simply need to put up a survey asking your customers how satisfied they are with your services.

Depending on the medium you are using to administer the survey, you can add one to three open-ended questions to learn more about what they think of your services.

Customer satisfaction surveys can be served through email, through your website, or through your app.

Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT)

The CSAT is the standard metric for measuring customer satisfaction. Here, you ask customers to rate how satisfied they are with your products or services on a scale. The scale could be 1 – 3, 1 – 5, or 1 – 10.

After receiving responses from various customers, you then find the average rating to determine your customer satisfaction score. The higher the score, the more satisfied customers are with your services.

Net Promoter Score (NPS)

This is another popular metric for measuring how happy customers are with your business and your services.

Unlike the other metrics covered here, however, NPS does not measure how satisfied customers are with your business. Instead, it measures how likely they are to refer someone to your business. This is especially useful for those in the freelance business, which depends heavily on referrals.

The NPS will ask a customer to rate on a scale of 1 – 10, how likely they are to recommend your business to their friends and acquaintances.

The NPS categorizes your customers into 3 groups:

• Promoters: These are customers who give you a rating of 9 – 10. They are willing to spread the word about your business and recommend your products and services. These customers are already satisfied with your business.
• Neutral/Passives: These are customers who give you a rating of 7 – 8. They are indifferent to your business. They aren’t disappointed with your business, but they aren’t satisfied either. They are unlikely to talk about your business to others.
• Detractors: These are customers who give your business a rating of 6 and below. They are unhappy with your business, and will spread negative word about your business in a bid to discourage others from doing business with you.

The Net Promoter Score is a very useful metric. If someone is willing to recommend your business to others, then this means that your products or services are good enough that they would stake their reputation on them.

Customer Effort Score (CES)

This metric measures customer experience, particularly how hard it is for your customers to get what they want from your business. Customers are typically asked to rate their effort from 1 (very little effort) to 7 (very high effort).

A high score means that customers have to work very hard to get what they need from your business, which translates to poor customer experience.

Social Media Mentions

Keeping track of what people are saying about your business on social media can also help you figure out how satisfied your customers are with your business.

Satisfied customers will take to social media to praise your business, while unhappy customers will share their dissatisfaction with their social media followers.

Monitoring the conversations about your business happening on social media will allow you to step in and respond to comments in time and control your brand perception, especially when people are sharing negative comments.

Here are three tools that you can use to track social media mentions:

• Google Alerts
• Mention
• SocialMention

4. Put Customer Value First, Profits Will Follow

A lot of entrepreneurs believe that the core purpose of a business is to make profits.

Smart entrepreneurs, those with the right entrepreneurial mindset, on the other hand, know that the core purpose of a business is to serve its customers. Therefore, their core focus is on delivering customer value.

Of course, this does not mean that businesses that put customer value first don’t think about profits. They do. What differs is their approach.

These businesses understand that when you keep your customers happy (by delivering great value), these customers will bring more business, and spread positive word about your business, leading to more business, and ultimately, greater profits.

Actually, the findings of research by Deloitte and Touche show that companies that put customers first are 60% more profitable compared to those that don’t.

So, what exactly does it mean to put customer value first?

Putting customer value first means that every single business decision made within your organization should have a positive impact on customer experience.

For instance, when upgrading its systems, a customer-centric company will choose systems that allow it to deliver the best customer experience.

Similarly, when hiring, customer-centric companies go for employees who show a knack for putting customers first. Basically, every decision is evaluated based on its impact on customer experience.

Here are some tips on how to make your company customer-centric and put customer value first:

• Understand your customers deeply. It is impossible to put customers first when you don’t even know who they are. To get a good understanding of who your customers are, you need to develop highly detailed buyer personas. Actually, gaining a good understanding of the customer segments you’re targeting is a key component of the business model canvas.
• Make sure that all your team members are engaged and have a good idea of the impact of their work on customer experience.
• Make it a habit to collect customer feedback, and then use this feedback to gain insights on how to improve the customer experience.
• Don’t just focus on getting customers to make the purchase. Focus on building relationships that will turn them into loyal customers and brand ambassadors.
• Be easily accessible. Make it easy for customers to get in touch with your business when they have an issue, or when they need any sort of help.

Ready To Put Your Customers In The Boss’s Seat?

As an entrepreneur, you are in business to serve your customers, which means that your customers are your boss. If you want your business to thrive, you need to start treating them as such, by putting their needs first.

In this article, we have gone over 4 key points on how to make the customer your boss. Here’s a recap:

1. Identify the key problems customers want to get solved
2. Make sure your offering solves those customer problems
3. Track and measure customer satisfaction
4. Put customer value first and profits will follow

Free Downloads & Extras From The Episode

“How To Make The Customer Your Boss” (PDF): Get It Here

“The Austrian Business Model” (video): https://e4epod.com/model

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