Why You Need To Bring Customer Knowledge To The Foreground

The new era of Consumer Duty is here.

And this means making more of having a customer first mindset. Whether your customer is the broker, the borrower or another company, the principles remain. And that means two things:

1. Starting your internal meetings with discussions about your customer (not Sales figures)
   

2. Know what you would most like to know about your customers
   

The First Thing On Your Meeting Agendas To have a customer mindset means putting your customers first - and this means on those meeting agendas. In your next meetings - whether as a Marketing team, or with Sales or with your leadership team - don’t start the conversation with an update on sales figures. This should follow.

Instead, your starting point should now be to think about and talk about the customer – whether your customer is the broker or a consumer, or someone else.

Get The Balance Right With Marketing, everything starts and ends the customer. So should your conversations. This does not mean you don’t discuss sales targets and other key metrics, but it’s about striking a balance. The right balance. And a balance that favours customer-centricity. It’s about having a balanced approach that leads to delivering customer-led goals. This Is Important Because…

Starting your conversations about the customer is essential. And there are many reasons for this, such as:

• Because you are not just trying to hit sales targets, you are trying to enhance overall customer experience.
  

• Because in Marketing, you need to ensure you fully understand your customers.
  

• Because your marketing is looking to enhance engagement across your different channels.
  

• Because you are looking to enhance customer perceptions of your brand.
  

• Because you want to create greater customer awareness and understanding of your brand.
  

• Because you want your brand to be seen as superior to your competition.

Know What You Need To Know And Talk About

There is so much you will want to know about your customers. And that knowledge leads your internal discussions. And that knowledge leads to creative thinking to devise cunning solutions to outwit the competition. You may want to know things like this:

• Knowing are they thinking and doing right now. - their motivations and behaviours
  

• What do they like and dislike.
  

• What are their challenges and how can you solve these?
  

• What are your customers saying about the market and about your brand is rather important.
  

• If your customer is the broker, what are their clients thinking and doing right now?
  

• Their thoughts and feelings about your brand
  

• Where they are in the Sales funnel and how that impact the points above.
  

Fundamentally, you need to think like your customers. You need walk in their shoes. And with all this understanding, you have something important to begin your meetings with.

A New World Order

In a world where Customer Duty is alive and kicking, this can be ignored only by those who do not care about their customers. This means you need to focus a bit more on your customers.

Get That New Mindset - Now

Challenge yourselves now. Don’t start internal meetings by taking about numbers. Start by talking about your customers. This means that when you get onto talk about business related sales figures and your marketing performance, you will be thinking like a customer and might see things differently.