Customer Love as a key to hyper-growth

Authored by Anirudh Arun, Co-Founder and COO, BluSmart

In highly competitive and rapidly growing markets, the most crucial factor in driving business success is building strong and lasting relationships with customers. Most top brands are able to strengthen these bonds with their customers with every experience, creating a community of super-fans who advocate and evangelise the brand. In short, customer love is the key to rapid, non-linear growth.

The foundation of customer love lies in satisfying customers with good experiences repeatedly, but its super-structure requires the creation of emotional connections with them. Customers should feel that the company genuinely cares about their needs, preferences, and desires. By delivering a personalised experience that is tailored to meet customers’ unique needs, marketers and brand owners can earn their trust and loyalty. 

Here are some ways that we put customer love at the forefront of our business to achieve hyper-growth.

Understanding customer needs

The obvious first step in building customer love is to understand the customer's needs. To do this, brands collect information about the customer’s preferences, lifestyle choices, and feedback. In an increasingly connected and digital world, it is possible to accurately measure and mathematically analyse the purchase and usage behaviour of a large number of customers in a way that was not possible earlier. This allows brands to identify trends and insights about various segments of customers, and also understand each individual who interacts with their digital storefronts, apps, websites, etc. 

This makes the delivery of personalised experiences an essential customer requirement. This has been excellently covered in Salesforce’s “State of the Connected Customer” report: 66 percent of customers expect businesses to understand their needs.

Understanding their needs precisely can help marketers tailor products and services to suit each user’s persona and habits, and allows the brand to stand out amidst the clutter. For example, in the BluSmart app, there’s a CO2 Savings tracker available for every user that enables them to assess the amount of CO2 they have been able to save by travelling in EVs. The tracker isn’t something directly related to the utilitarian aspect of mobility, but it gives customers a sense of achievement and delight.

In a report by McKinsey, over 76 percent of respondents mentioned that they are more likely to buy from a brand that personalises and 78 percent mentioned that they are likely to recommend it to others as well.

Listen, listen & listen

Marketers have got to seek consistent feedback from their customers and use it to improve their services and even customise the brand promise.

For any consumer-facing business in today’s age, listening and talking to the final consumer might give far better insights than the numbers on a dashboard ever will. It’s a good mix of quantitative and qualitative where the magic lies. 

Taking customer feedback seriously and using it to identify areas of improvement ensures that customers feel heard, valued, and appreciated. Channelling the voice of the customer to various organisational teams - like product, operations, business and finance - can help a brand stay ahead of competition.

Great brand promise + Reliable delivery = Growth

Consistent and reliable service is essential in building customer love. Just as the “aha” moment of a brand is seen as the key to customer acquisition, the rigour, discipline and predictable quality of service delivery must be seen as the roots of customer retention. Brands may need to invest in technology, training, infrastructure and other verticals to enable the delivery of a consistent experience to customers over time.

It just takes a single mistake to undo all the positivity that you’ve created as a brand. PwC’s report on the Future of Customer Experience cites that around 59% of customers in the United States mentioned how they’d walk away from a product or service after just one bad experience. 

It is important to set the expectations of customers correctly, and deliver on these expectations every single time. This means it may be better for a Quick Commerce brand to promise and reliably deliver on a 20-minute delivery promise than to promise a 10-minute delivery and miss this target 50% of the time.

Walking the talk is the motto that businesses should strive for. If you’re going ahead and promising a product’s or service’s USPs, you need to adhere to that. It’s only when there are gaps in the promise and the delivery that the cracks begin to appear.

Building a sense of community

Community-building is a very underrated concept. When done right, it can deliver on two fronts: acquisition of new customers and retention of current ones. 

By offering incentives, promotions, and referral programs, brands can encourage their customers to share their love with their friends and family. This acts as a social signalling tool fulfilling emotional needs of the customers, as well as a hook to get more people to try the brand’s offerings. Being part of a community enhances customer loyalty. 

Marketers need to redefine what community means for their brands and understand what might keep them engaged.

The Takeaway: Understand, listen, and execute.

In conclusion, customer love is the key to achieving hyper-growth not only in the EV ride-hailing industry but in any B2C category. 

By building strong and lasting relationships with their customers, marketers can attract and retain a loyal customer base. 

Keeping customer love at the forefront of a business, understanding their needs, listening to feedback, delivering consistent and reliable service, offering unique and differentiated services, and building a sense of community aren’t just a list of good to have things anymore, but a must-have in every marketer’s arsenal.

By doing so, we can achieve hyper-growth and establish our brand as a leader in the industry.