The global marketplace delivers unprecedented customer choice, making competition stiffer than ever. Access to reviews and insights instantly shows potential clients the benefits and downsides of choosing your business over another. That’s why companies are increasingly prioritizing a customer-centric approach in their international business strategies.
Create a customer-centered strategy that meets your clients’ expectations, and you’ll build customer loyalty and drive revenue growth. However, customer centricity goes beyond good customer service—it involves actively listening to customer feedback, speaking your customer’s language, and solving problems before they occur to create a better overall experience.
In this guide, we’ll explore the customer-centric approach, list several benefits of client-centricity, and explain how your business can measure the success of a customer-centered strategy.
Understanding the meaning of customer-centric means putting the customer first in everything a business does. A customer-centric approach influences nearly every part of the business, from product development to marketing and customer service.
Data and feedback provide insight into your customer’s needs, helping you put them at the heart of all your decision-making. You can use this data to solve customer problems, offer personalized experiences, and build long-term relationships. For example, here are some ways major transnational brands employ a customer-centric mindset in their business decisions:
To become a customer-centric business, you need a strategy that focuses on providing an excellent customer experience. This may include improved customer service, personalized product recommendations, fast and reliable delivery, intuitive web design to streamline the customer journey, or loyalty programs to boost customer satisfaction. It all depends on your business and your customer needs.
Here are five tips to follow when developing a customer-centric mindset in your business:
If your company is going global, prepare for varied expectations and customer journeys across international markets and cultures. Market research uncovers your customers’ buying behaviors and preferences so you can match their desires.
To become a truly global brand, you need multilingual customer support. Locals are far more likely to trust your brand and feel understood when the service or product is offered in their first language. In addition, consider translating websites, localizing marketing content, and hiring employees locally to create multilingual customer service teams.
Businesses should maintain open communication, actively listen to customer feedback, and respond quickly to concerns. Personalized follow-ups, loyalty programs, and consistent support show customers they are valued, increasing the likelihood they return and recommend the business to others. You’ll enjoy boosted sales and increased customer lifetime value.
Many customer-focused businesses improve the customer journey by personalizing the shopping experience through e-commerce localization. They present products in local languages, use local currencies, and recommend items based on customer needs.
The benefits are far-reaching. In fact, 65% of customers prefer to shop on websites in their language, even if the translation isn’t perfect. It makes shopping easier and more comfortable, leading to more purchases and stronger customer loyalty.
Companies should actively change their marketing to fit the culture of each region. This means using colors, images, and words that feel familiar to local customers. For example, Coca-Cola creates special red and gold packaging for the Chinese New Year to celebrate luck and happiness.
Businesses should explore multiple methods to accurately track the progress of their customer-centric strategy. Here are some of the most effective approaches:
Every culture and region has its own unique set of values and norms. These preferences and behaviors can influence how local customers interact with products and services, meaning what works in one country may not work in another. For instance, red symbolizes luck in China but is more associated with caution in Western markets.
Before launching a marketing campaign or product, test it with focus groups in target regions. A/B split testing will maximize your chances of success, showing you which versions of ads or products perform best. This may include checking images, colors, slogans, and product features for cultural appropriateness. You’ll gain data and insights on whether your marketing materials and product offerings align with customer needs in specific regions.
Poor translation quality can confuse or alienate customers, leading to lost sales and a damaged reputation. Linguistic quality assurance (LQA) is a standard practice in the localization industry for evaluating and providing feedback on translations based on an objective schema.
LQA can be performed by internal localization teams or by your outsourced language service provider. LQA can evaluate the quality of translations produced by any method of translation, including human translations, machine translations or machine translations with edits. Ensuring high-quality translations can help boost customer experience and help you avoid alienating customers in multilingual markets.
Perhaps the most insightful metric is your customer retention rate. This tracks the percentage of customers who continue buying from your company over a specific period. Companies that maximize this metric increase their customer lifetime value—a reliable source of revenue.
To calculate customer retention, look at how many customers your company had at the start of a selected period and how many remain customers at the end. You can use customer purchase data and loyalty program participation to calculate this. For example, if your company started the year with 1,000 customers, and 900 of them are still buying at the end of the year, it has an impressive 90% retention rate.
A high retention rate is an excellent metric to prove the strength of the customer relationships you’ve built with your customer-centric business approach.
Becoming a customer-centric company requires a global marketing strategy that meets customer needs and preferences in international markets. Localization is pivotal for any customer-focused strategy. It allows you to deliver personalized and culturally relevant shopping experiences that improve customer experience.
Smartling offers a cloud-based translation management platform with integrations that make it easy to translate at every step of your tech stack. Smartling helps you bring a customer-centric approach to global audiences by making it easy and efficient to translate your websites, mobile apps, and digital content.
Ready to see how localization can drive value for your brand? Watch our webinar, “From Cost Center to Value Driver: Proving Localization ROI,” to learn how effective localization strategies can support customer centricity and increase customer lifetime value. These insights will turn your localization strategy into a powerful tool for global success.