The customer Is always right: Fact or hoax?

Tope Anisere

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Businesses and startups often build products around users’ needs and pain points and try to ensure a smooth user experience. Many operate on the premise of product-led growth (PLG), which reinforces the belief that the customer is always right, but is this always the case?

The short answer is no; however, satisfying your customers’ needs should be the guiding principle for businesses looking for growth and market acceptance.

In this blog post, we’ll explore the rights of a customer and the truth behind the “customer is always right” mentality.

Essential customer rights every business should respect

Right to be heard:

In some cases, customers run into roadblocks while using a product, which usually delays them from achieving their goal. Hence, by right, there should be a medium or channel for users to air their complaints without the risk of being poorly treated by the customer service agent. This ensures that users have a seamless and worthwhile experience with your product.

Right to seek resolution to issues:

Customers can voice their concerns and complaints about your product or service and get a quick solution to these issues. This is important for keeping customers loyal and happy.

Right to feel confident about your product.

The reliability of your product or service is critical to customer satisfaction and influences their decision to remain loyal to your brand. When users can confidently and easily navigate your product, they become unpaid brand ambassadors spreading the word about your business.

What does “The customer is always right” really mean?

The “Customer is Always Right” mindset embodies a “Customer-first mentality.” Businesses can create excellent customer experiences by prioritising the needs of their customers, and here are some to achieve this:

How to build a customer-centric business

Build a usable product:

For most customer-centric startups, having a visually appealing product and innovative idea is just the beginning. It’s essential to conduct thorough user research and execute the implementation flawlessly with the development team. This ensures users can easily navigate your product without much guidance, leading to an excellent user experience.

Have a reliable product:

Reliability means your product, system, or service will perform as expected, consistently meeting the user’s expectations without unexpected failures or downtimes. Beyond marketing and paid ads, having a reliable product helps build long-term customer relationships, becomes a key selling point to attract new users, and gives you a competitive edge in the market.

Accessible customer service:

Having accessible customer service allows businesses to resolve complaints and issues quickly and prevents them from escalating into bigger problems. As a business owner or startup founder, ensure that user guides, articles, and live chat sessions with customer support agents are readily available to help users when they encounter issues with your product or service. This is vital for building positive customer relationships.

Personalised experience:

Personalisation helps create meaningful and emotional connections with your users. You can improve engagement and conversions and increase brand loyalty by tailoring your product experience to each customer’s needs, preferences, and behavior. Some ways to personalize users’ experience include collecting data to understand their interests and needs, segmentation based on the data collected, creating relevant content, and gathering user feedback.

Wrapping up

Ultimately, your product or business's success depends on understanding your customers’ problems and providing solutions. Solving issues keeps customers happy and loyal, even when not always

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