February is the month of love. So what better time to show some love to your customers. Just as February is the month of love, with Valentine’s Day as its centrepiece, companies can make every day a celebration of their customers by putting them at the heart of their business.
A customer-centric approach is all about showing your customers that you care, just like how you would show your loved ones how much you care on Valentine’s Day. By making your customers feel valued and appreciated, you can build strong, long-lasting relationships with them and drive positive business outcomes.
In this article, we’ll explore what it means to be customer-centric and how companies can adopt this approach to create a culture of customer love.
Being customer centric means that a business places the needs and wants of its customers at the centre of all its decisions and actions. The focus is on creating a positive customer experience and providing value to the customer.
The benefits of being a customer centric business are immense and include:
Increased customer loyalty: Customers are more likely to return to a business that has demonstrated a genuine interest in their needs and satisfaction.
Improved customer satisfaction: A customer-focused business is better equipped to address customer complaints and resolve problems quickly and efficiently.
Better reputation: Word-of-mouth advertising is a powerful tool and a customer-centric business is more likely to receive positive reviews and recommendations from satisfied customers.
Increased sales: A customer-centric business is more likely to understand the needs of its customers and be able to offer products and services that meet those needs.
Competitive advantage: By putting the customer first, a business is able to differentiate itself from its competitors and establish a competitive advantage.
Enhanced employee morale: When a business places a high value on customer satisfaction, employees are more motivated to provide the best possible customer experience.
This approach can help agencies to not only meet customer expectations, but also exceed them and establish long-lasting customer relationships.
To be truly customer-centric, companies need to take a holistic approach, considering all touchpoints in the customer journey and ensuring that each one is optimised for a positive customer experience. This includes everything from product design and marketing, to customer service and after-sales support.
Understand your customers One key aspect of being customer-centric is having a deep understanding of the customer. This requires gathering and analysing data on customer behaviour, preferences, and feedback, and using that information to inform business decisions. Companies can also engage directly with customers through surveys, focus groups, and other methods to gain insights into their needs and desires.
Another important aspect is having a flexible, responsive approach to customer needs. Companies need to be able to adapt quickly to changing customer preferences and needs, and be willing to make changes to their products, services, or processes as needed.
Technology In addition, companies need to invest in the right technology and resources to support a customer-centric approach. This includes customer relationship management (CRM) systems, data analytics tools, and a strong customer service team.
Be more Profitable Overall, being customer-centric is a strategic approach that can help companies to build stronger, more profitable relationships with their customers. By putting the customer at the centre of all business decisions, companies can create a culture that values customer satisfaction and drives positive business outcomes.
So don’t just have February as the month of love – use February as the month to start loving your customers all year round.
Hot on the heels of Freia’s announcement last month I am delighted to announce another Associate Guide joining Agency Local. Today, Owen Hughes has graduated from being a Member of Agency Local to being a Guide. For Owen this is a natural progression and follows his passion of helping others to develop their businesses. Owen has a proven track-record of generating significant income and planning ambitious, yet achievable business strategies.
The recruitment of Guides are a key part of being able to provide the best business support to agencies – helping them come to terms with the stresses and challenges of running and growing an agency business. Owen is the latest person to assist us to deliver this.
Agency Background
Owen brings with him a wealth of strategic, commercial and agency experience. He has run his agency – EWO Communications for over 20 years providing organisations with strategic, commercial marketing advice and support. He grew his agency to a team of 24 people, winning and working with some great brands including Brother, BMW, Porsche, Roussel Pharmaceuticals, Metacube, Salesforce, Saracens RFC, Wasps as well as local and regional businesses.
I have known Owen personally for many years. When I ran my agency, Owen and I collaborated on projects and since Agency Local launched he has been a very strong supporter and contributor to the community.
Sustainability and Purpose
Owen has a passion for helping business with purpose. Having recognised that organisations needed to develop a programme of activity that supported the local community, he has spent the past decade working across all sectors to develop CSR strategies that enhance the value of the organisation and in doing so, assisting these businesses to grow, increase profit margins and attract a focused, engaged workforce.
Most recently, Owen has been involved in launching the first global CSR accreditation programme, establishing a global network of partners and members – CSR-A.
I am sure you will join me in welcoming Owen to the community as Associate Guide. I know he will be able to support many agencies along their journeys and if you don’t already know Owen then I suggest you set up a call with him.
As part of Agency Local planned development in line with our mission to provide a one stop business support infrastructure for agencies we are expanding the capabilities on offer to members by growing the ‘Agency Business Guides’ and agency partners.
We are really delighted to announce that Freia Muehlenbein has joined Agency Local as an Associate Guide. Freia will bring a wealth of agency business growth experience and her knowledge and guidance will provide a huge contribution to individual agencies, members and the community as a whole. Freia is a German-British agency growth consultant with 12 years of experience in growing and improving agencies. She supports digital, creative, and marketing agencies with the delivery of strategic initiatives, operational processes and systems, leadership development, change management, and pitch close rate optimisation. Her super power is translating strategic goals into simple initiatives that lead to improved productivity and efficiency.
Freia runs Be-Reyt and will be providing her services to Agency Local members. As you may gather by the business name she is based ‘up north’ in Leeds. We are really excited to have Freia as part of Agency Local and am so looking forward to working with her to support her supporting our agency members. Please say big ‘Hi’ to Freia.
We have some exciting news to share with the whole agency community. From January 2023 we will be rolling out version 3 of agency local.
It is our aim to provide the best all round business support infrastructure for small and growing agencies on your business journey. Yes, ‘all round business support’, not just sales, but every aspect of running a business from positioning and marketing, understanding your agency finance, and developing process.
In fact everything that will add real value to your business and will mean you are running a great agency.
Why version 3 ?
Agency Local was founded in 2019 and the first iteration was in a pre pandemic world, where we had face to face events and offered workshops.
Version 2 was a reaction to the pandemic and it laid the foundations for what agency local will become. During this time our aim was to support and help agencies to survive and thrive through the pandemic. This was done by running business educational online events and starting support groups, and offering 121 coaching.
Now we are in a post-pandemic age and what we provide to agencies needs to adapt and change once again for us to be able to provide a premium Business Support infrastructure for marketing agencies.
Welcome to Agency Local 3.0.
Our vision remains the same
To accompany agency owners on their agency business journey by providing a community to support and transform their agency business. Expanding business knowledge to create an agency with solid foundations, practical implementation support and build value into the business for the future. To create the clarity of direction for the journey and to be there for the short term bumps in the road.
What’s Changing?
Oh where to start! Learning and Education
In September we paused the ‘Ask The Expert ‘webinars and piloted ‘Active Based Learning’ (ABL). ABL is a much more practical focused experience with actions and accountability. The feedback has been amazing.
“This was the first time I have come away from a session genuinely inspired to make changes in the way I undertake my work. It was also great to speak to some focused, interesting people, all who had different ideas and experiences.” Owen Hughes MD EWO
We develop a practical focus for the month designed to improve your skills and to make an improvement to your agency. Knowledge is provided by short form videos for learning, followed up by a members event to discuss, experiment and apply to your agency. Accountability buddies are established and at the end of the month we come together to review the impact, celebrate successes and to counter any challenges. So far our Practical Focuses have been on Time Management (how to get 4 hours back a week), Managing the emotion and commotion of Change (becoming a change agent) and Negotiation skills (winning better deals). This is available for ALL members of Agency Local.
Peer Groups
We know how important it is to be surrounded by people that ‘get’ your business and your challenges.
We have been running ‘90 Day Planning’ groups for over a year and half now and these are brilliant for making significant changes and improvements in your business – on an ongoing basis. We are now expanding these by offering two new groups in January. Agency Business Club
This is for those young agencies with 2-9 employees or teams that are serious about surviving and thriving. You will learn, you will be challenged, you will support others, and above all you will be held accountable. You will also have the opportunity to work with a ‘Guide’ on a 1to1 basis. This will be a half day on line group with a max of 8 people. Upper Club
This for those agencies with 10 – 25 employees where the business challenges are somewhat different. Establishing teams, leadership teams, becoming more efficient, reducing your time in the agency. Same learning, challenge and accountability. This is a full day offsite group meeting.
Agency Business Guides
In order to be able to provide the premium business support we are expanding the number of Guides in Agency Local. They will all have extensive experience of running and most cases selling an agency. This provides a deeper pool of expertise as each Guide will have their own areas of specialism to support any agency problem or situation.
Agency Local Partners
A vital part of our community will be our partners. Partners are other businesses that provide services, training or products specific to agencies. All Agency Local members will have access to these partners from within the community channels and will enjoy a discount off their products and services. There will be a bigger announcement about these partners in the coming weeks.
New year, many changes, one new agency business support community.
As we head into what will no doubt be another turbulent year the need for support, learning and guidance becomes even more critical.
The changes announced here are designed to give you, the agency owner, founder or senior leader the access to all you need to help you to be more successful, to build a solid business and to create value in your best asset – your agency.
We look forward to welcoming you and working with you over the coming months and years.
You are on a business journey, we will be there for you at every stage of that journey. If you are interested in finding out more please reach out to Chris Bantock or any of the Guides or via the Contact Page we would be happy to help you.
November Active Based Learning Focus – Negotiation
Our Action Based Learning topic for November is all about the thorny topic of Negotiation.
How key is being able to negotiate? We all negotiate in both our business and personal lives (thinking with the other half / our children!). This is a life skill. The better we are at negotiating, the better outcomes we achieve in life. Negotiation is NOT about beating the other person into submission – it IS about achieving a result that works for both parties. Win Win.
This month’s focus will begin by teaching you a skill that will stay with you forever. I say begin, as it will give you some of the key tactics that you can have at your disposal. However, for these skills to become a habit, you need to practise, practice, practice.
A wider definition of negotiation Most of us have this idea of negotiation being bartering in a sales environment. Yes, this is the most common application of negotiation skills. However the skills are transferable into use in other areas that you maybe you had not thought about.
Having those difficult conversations Negotiation skills help with hiring people, establishing partnerships where agreements need to be met. More importantly, having these skills will help you have those difficult conversations with employees, partners, customers.
Dealing with clients These skills will equip you with techniques that you can use when having the ‘scope creep’ conversations with customers, or when you need to charge extra for some work. This is not normally seen as negotiation skills however the tactics and skills are the same.
Emotional side of Negotiation Often the only thing getting in the way of successful negotiation is …. ourselves.
We don’t have the confidence in our ability, the belief in ourselves. A large part of successful negotiation is how we handle the situation emotionally. This is the focus of the book of the month – Collywobbles: how to negotiate when negotiation makes you nervous by Mushe Cohen.
I urge you to read this book and keep it with you as a constant reference or a manual to refer back to.
Our Guest Experts
We are honoured to have Phil Brown with us this month. His background is procurement of marketing services(!) and he is a skilled negotiator. He now runs The Negotiation Club. Phil will be running the Inspiration Circle Negotiation Club. See what to expect.
We also have with us Moshe Cohen – the author of ‘Collywobbles – how to negotiate when Negotiation gets in the way ‘- which is our book of the month.
BookClub – Author in attendance!
Synopsis of the book. Negotiations are challenging and sometimes scary. You prepare and know what you want, but then things go terribly wrong. Your emotions get in the way. Sometimes you don’t even try, or lose your way and fail to achieve your objectives. This book helps you get out of your own way, manage your emotions, and negotiate effectively.
I am delighted that the Author, Moshe Cohen will be joining us at the bookclub this month. This will be a great opportunity to ask questions on his book, explore some of his ideas in more details and get some really valuable insights into negotiation that maybe you had not thought about.
NB: Special Offer
Moshe has agreed to provide any member that buys the book a 30 min 121 session. How valuable would that be?
Summary of Activity
All the learning videos are available in the Member portal – these focus on negotiation tactics – there are 5 videos focusing oin different tactics
The Inspiration Circle will be a Negotiation Club – hosted by Phil Brown. Thursday 10th Nov @9.30am
The Inspiration Clinic at the end of the month is where we come together to discover what we learnt and celebrate the successes. Friday 25th @9.30am
The Bookclub is an audience with Moshe Cohen – not to be missed. Tuesday 29th @3pm
Please register for this months events – links below.
