What Is a Customer-Driven Company and What Does It Do?

Updated September 30, 2022

A customer-driven company is one that develops policies, products and goals based on customer desires and needs. Across industries, customer-driven companies can connect with their supporters and integrate the knowledge of customer habits and ideals into product design, development, distribution and marketing. Learning more about customer-driven companies and what they do can help you promote customer-focused policies within your role, offering opportunities for business advancement.

In this article, we define a customer-driven company, describe some examples of policies that these companies may use and offer some steps you can follow to integrate customer-driven policies into your position within an organization.

What is a customer-driven company?

A customer-driven company is one that focuses on customers when developing its business strategies. Throughout all operations, including research, development, marketing and sales, a customer-driven company considers the needs of its customers and develops policies to reflect them. To successfully integrate customer-driven work throughout an organization, a company may create a culture of customer service through policies and goals and promote it to all employees.

What do customer-driven companies do?

Here are some examples of policies and strategies a customer-driven company may employ:

A loyalty program for frequent customers
Surveys after each customer purchase
Engagement with customers on social media
Dedicated departments or individuals who respond to customer concerns and feedback
Research into current customer trends and purchasing habits
Customer focus groups that discuss needs and desires
Easy-to-navigate websites or other customer platforms
Investment in causes or initiatives customers care about
Customer-service training integrated into all departments
Constant product updates to provide more value to customers

How to integrate customer-driven policy into an organization

Here are seven steps you can follow to promote a sense of customer-driven identity within a company:

1. Determine your market

An important step to begin promoting customer-driven policy is to understand your customers. Consider engaging in market research to understand who's buying the company's products. You can also learn demographic information about the customer including their ages, locations and preferred methods of shopping. Understanding this information can help you begin to determine the best ways to reach customers. It can also help you determine which strategies can be most impactful as you progress in developing a customer-driven identity. For example, if you learn that many customers are younger, you can begin prioritizing social media engagement strategies.

2. Understand customer needs

After determining the organization's market, you can begin completing advanced research to understand what customers want from an organization. Consider speaking to customers through surveys or focus groups or researching common desires and needs for their demographics. You can also analyze past customer engagement and satisfaction data to determine whether there are any opportunities to better meet needs. Once you understand what customers want and need, you can begin creating policies to reflect that data.

3. Create customer-driven policies

Based on customer research, you can begin creating policies that target specific needs and desires. This can include customer-facing policies and strategies to improve customer service internally. For example, if customers indicate that they want to shop at environmentally responsible organizations, the company can take steps to limit its products' impacts. If customers indicate that they feel like it's too challenging to contact customer support, you can create and promote a dedicated support department with easy access by phone or email.

4. Promote a culture of service throughout departments

In addition to policies that meet customer needs, you can also create an internal culture that focuses on customer service. Some ways to do this include integrating customer service training into all roles or developing specific customer-focused goals and displaying them on posters or company documents throughout the organization. You can also develop policies that allow non-customer-facing employees like product developers to collaborate with customer-facing workers like those in sales. By doing this, you can ensure that all employees understand customer needs throughout the product creation and distribution process.

Related: Guide to Company Culture

5. Consistently collect feedback

A good way to understand if the policies and strategies you create are effective is to consistently collect data from customers. This can include brief surveys to learn more about the customer experience after making a purchase or opportunities to offer feedback after engaging with customer support professionals or other customer-facing departments. Gathering this data can help you determine if there are potential areas for improvement. It can also help gauge changes in customer experience over time, including whether new products or initiatives make the desired impact.

6. Engage with customers across platforms

Another way to promote customer-driven philosophy is to consistently engage with customers across all relevant platforms. This can include social media, by email, over the phone or in person, if possible. As you engage with customers, you can promote products, answer questions or concerns or offer opportunities to connect and build brand loyalty.

Consider using your customer research to determine the areas where you can prioritize engagement. For example, if a large number of a company's customers are active on a certain social media platform, you can build and promote a profile there that engages customers. As you accomplish this, you can use the brand's identity, voice and personality to connect with customers in an authentic way.

7. Reward loyalty

Many customer-driven companies also frequently reward customer loyalty. This can help establish and maintain strong customer relationships and make customers feel as if they get something from their frequent business. Some examples of loyalty programs could be a discount or free item after a certain number of purchases, a reward for following a company on social media or special events or promotions for the most dedicated customers.

You can also celebrate customer achievements by offering public recognition to customers who use your products in an interesting way or achieve goals through your partnership. For example, if you work for a retail brand, you can repost pictures of customers wearing the company's clothes on social media. You can also highlight important customers or partners in regular newsletters or other internal and external-facing documents.