10 Things that Matter to Customers in 2021

Saphyte Team

4 min read

Updated: November 16th, 2022

The famous magazine, Entrepreneur Asia Pacific, tagged 2021 as the year of the customer. Over the past year, marketers and leading sales leaders learned a lot, whether they liked it or not. After a tough year, it’s time for businesses to go back to basics and focus on what matters – the customers. 

The consumer landscape experienced a sudden tectonic shift as businesses and consumers moved into a fully digitized realm of sales and marketing over the past year and several months. Therefore, strategies and approaches also changed. The focus became less about traditional marketing and sales methods and is now leaning more toward rethinking the whole digital customer journey and, most importantly, the customer experience.

Why should Businesses be Paying Attention to the Customer? 

Emotions, whether you deny them or not, creates an impact. It’s like a ripple. Customers who feel ignored by businesses feel rejection, and rejection can lead to many downward spirals. Meanwhile, when customers feel that they’re heard and valued by the business, it can positively impact your business. 

Businesses must listen to their customers, as customers directly impact your revenue. To actively be involved in your customer’s overall journey – this is where you must apply customer service and customer experience. 

Delivering excellent customer service and experiences is a practical approach in reducing the expense of operations and investing in improving their customer’s experience, and moving the needle on revenue. To do so, you must know what’s on top of your customer’s minds or the things that matter to them. 

What Matters Most to Your Customers 

Knowing what matters to customers and how they might interact with your brand is essential to your business’s success. So what are the things that matter to customers? Saphyte has listed ten things that matter to customers in 2021. 

Omnichannel Communication

With the fast-paced environment, customers will always want to reach out to you at any time. A study has shown that customers no longer desire to communicate with companies when and where it’s most convenient for them — they expect and demand it from your business. 

Unlike before, this new approach to conversational commerce is much bigger than your ordinary live chat. Though live chat is a part of the whole approach, it’s no longer the focus. Consumers expect and demand the ease of connectivity with your brand on their preferred communication platform.

But what is an omnichannel communication approach? An omnichannel communication approach allows businesses to deliver a seamless and constant experience across various communication channels (email, social media chat, website chatbots, etc.) while factoring in consumers’ different devices, behaviors, and choices.

Personalization taking Center Stage

On top of ease of communication, customers expect and demand personalization, and businesses notice this trend. And in 2021, hyper-personalization will take its place center stage. Data shows that customers value a friendly, efficient, and profound personalized customer service experience.

Never underestimate the influence of friendly, personalized interactions. One study shows that most customer buying decisions no longer rely on things like price or convenience. Instead, 70% of buying experiences depend on how a customer feels a company is treating them.

Communicate the Purchasing Process

Customers hate it when sellers dance around talking points like availability, price, discounts, total cost, add-on options, and so forth. Customers expect you to tell them, in plain and simple language, what items are included in their purchase and how the purchase will take place. No surprises and, most significantly, no last-minute upsells.

Showing Customers you Know Them

Customers no longer want to be a part of your sales number. They expect and demand them to feel seen, appreciated, and understood by the businesses they deal with every time. Of course, this is a natural human response, but it does create a massive impact on your revenue. 

The minor details can make a significant difference for your customers. You could start with tailored recommendations, greeting them on their birthdays, and addressing them by name when they’re talking to you. 

Agent Experience on Greater Focus

Agent Experience (AX) is the holistic outlook of how empowered, efficient, and influential a company’s customer service agents are. As is the case with almost any department in a business, prioritizing your team and staying in touch with your employee morale is the only authentic way to ensure positive customer reactions. 

You can do this by adequately equipping your agents with the right tools, enhanced training, make customer data more accessible, give specific and relevant feedback, and clear process documentation and flexible guidelines that allow agents to prioritize customer outcomes over their KPIs. 

Positive online engagement  

Brands are so obsessed with acquisition, clicks, and conversions that it can be easy for them to neglect the importance of the moments in between. Engaging customers between and beyond purchases will strengthen their emotional connection with your brand. Stronger ties between your customer and your brand will help you retain your hard-won customers.  

By positively communicating with your current customers online will make it much more likely for them to go out of their way to help boost your business socially.

Ability to trust your brand  

Trust is an issue with customers. While it is easy to set up your web page and social pages, it does not guarantee to build and maintaining trust. Customer trust is necessary for an environment where customer expectations increase daily and competition is intense. Customer trust is a brand differentiator that could make or break a business. 

Safety, convenience, and flexibility 

Safety, convenience, and flexibility are known as the new trifecta customer experience. After the pandemic, customers will prioritize their convenience, ease of transaction, and flexibility in options. No matter how great this need can be, the bottom line is that consumers demand it, and if your business isn’t convenient enough for them, they will look for one that is — presumably your competitors.

Understand ALL the Their (customer) Needs

Today, it’s no longer enough to “connect the stars” between your customer needs and your brand’s offering. By knowing and understanding what your customer needs is at the very core of every successful business, whether you’re directly selling to individuals or other companies. Once you have this knowledge, you can persuade potential and existing customers that purchasing from you is in their best interests.

Understanding your customers is the key to giving your customers good service, which further results in stronger customer relations and new sales through positive word-of-mouth recommendations.

Craft Compelling Solutions

Solution selling will be a great selling point for businesses this 2021. Customers demand and expect your business to have the essential selling skill of defining and proposing a valuable and practical solution. 

Always remember, your customer’s problem is always more important than your solution, and giving a solution to their problem should be your greatest priority.

Key Takeaway

Your customers are the bread and butter of your business. Knowing the things that matter most to them can set your business apart from your competitors. 

However, the key takeaway is catching up to these needs. To catch up to your customers’ needs, you need tools to gather, keep, and access data, keep business processes simple and make work easier for your employees. Saphyte can help you build these things. 

Saphyte is a UAE homegrown business operating out of Dubai. It is currently helping hundreds of companies drive digital transformation through local support, zero implementation fees, competitive subscription models, and an advanced CRM ecosystem technology.

Feel like talking about this opportunity more? Book a demo with us today, and our digital ecosystem experts will be right there with you.