Customer-centric communication uses strategic messaging to support compliant and responsive narratives. In the RFP process, customer-focused messaging takes many forms but should, at least, take account of a customer’s needs and vision, and include content customized for that specific customer.
Understanding the needs and vision of the client or prospect is critical to a customer-first dialogue, as evaluators are more inclined to identify with organizations that they feel understand them. This means that pinpointing those needs and using them to create content geared towards your specific customer will likely increase the interest of your evaluator.
The need to have customer-focused communication centers around market identification and competitive intelligence. You need to consider your competitors when developing a customer-first dialogue, and be acutely aware of how your services and products compare to those of your competitors. Doing your research and ensuring you understand the elements of the opportunity will no doubt improve customer messaging.
Using Your Customers’ Needs and Vision for Customer-Centricity
Organizations need to position themselves for a strategic win. While a complaint and responsive RFP is essential, a strategy which addresses services, products, competitive data and your customers’ needs is critical.
In short, customer centricity revolves around the ability of people in an organization to understand customers’ situations, perceptions and expectations and to position the customer as the focal point of all decisions related to delivering products, services and experiences. If you put your customers’ needs at the center of your strategy, this is a recipe for customer satisfaction, loyalty and advocacy.
Customer vision statements are useful when crafting customer-centric narratives. Having a clear handle on the client’s or prospect’s vision can help you to customize the customer-first dialogue. Customized vision statements can leverage your customers’ hot buttons and pain points to ensure you’re addressing their primary need with what you’re offering. Link the customer’s buying vision directly to the solicitation.
Creating Customized Content
Customizing customer content is also necessary for crafting customer-centric communication. You should use persuasive language specific to customer needs and vision. Persuasive language can take many forms, including using narratives, case studies, testimonials, and illustrations. Persuasive verbiage also includes the use of pronouns to signify a customer-first dialogue – use “you” over “we” so you’re speaking directly to the customer.
When discussing services or products, focus on how they can benefit the customer, rather than detailing the features. And most importantly, do key phrase research and understand the searcher intent behind those phrases. As written in Forbes: “Truly customer-centric content ties the searcher’s intent to the product on the page. It doesn’t rely on brand terms. Instead, it includes non-branded terms that speak to the product’s universe.”
Customer-Centric Tools
To help you with centering your customer when developing narratives, you can use tools such as writing assistants. Recent enhancements to many writing assistant tools mean that they now include generative AI promise, which can further aid customized content.
The use of writing assistants for a customer-first dialog must address needs, vision and customer content. Writing assistants like Copy.ai, Grammarly and Wordtune are good customer-centric creators. Users receive robust content creation tools for competitive intelligence, editing, emails, narratives, workflows, and much more. Let’s take a look at these writing assistants in a bit more detail:
- Copy.ai – a marketing content creator powered by generative AI. The platform creates customized long- and short-form content, as well as having capability for translations.
- Grammarly – a cloud-based writing assistant, that’s recently been improved to include generative AI.
- Wordtune – a generative AI writing assistant, which also allows users to customize their writing.
The most important thing when using writing prompts is ensuring that you use appropriate prompts. When you’re trying to get an AI tool to perform a task, your prompt gives it all the information it needs to perform the task. Prompts can be as simple or complex as needed for the task at hand. You might need to write a longer prompt that includes all the criteria you need the finished product to meet, like the piece’s ideal word count, tone or outline.
Implementing Customer-Centric Communication
Implementing customer-centric communication is at the forefront of the proposal management process. Proposal professionals using a customer-first dialogue must address needs and vision. Writing assistants have become necessary for a customer-first dialogue.
Customer-focused writing should encompass content relevant to the customer and supplier organization. Utilizing needs analysis, vision statements and writing assistant tools will help create strategic customer-centric messaging.
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