Why You Should Focus on Your Customers, Not Your Competition

Customer service has quickly become a major company differentiator as a result of changing customer behaviors during the pandemic. How does a company best approach successfully navigating this change?  

The answer is quite simple: focus on your customers and not on your competitors. While competitive analysis is important, a successful company will never lose sight of prioritizing what really matters: their customers.  

Our number one value at Five9 is to ‘always do the right thing for the customer.’ We don’t outline our goals in terms of ‘beating the competition’ or ‘winning’. There are two reasons for this: 

Customers Should Always Come First 

When company’s solely focus on beating their competition and prioritize winning, it is limiting to the work and creativity that can be fostered in employees. By simply attempting to do better than those around you, your company suffers because you are not considering the best that your company can do, only what others are achieving. By instead fixating on the best service that your company can provide to customers, the opportunity to fulfill top potential can be realized. 

Company Purpose 

In the CCaaS world, our own company’s success is based on the success of our customers. We prioritize focusing on customers rather than the competition because being driven by beating those around you does not give the company a sustainable purpose. Once you are better than your competitors, what will you do afterwards? Without a focus on the system within a company is operating, it is impossible to maintain the drive needed to keep your company’s momentum. 

The problems with focusing on a goal as opposed to the system at large are articulated in James Clear’s book Atomic Habits. Clear stresses that there are four things wrong with hyper-focusing on goals: 
 

Achieving a goal is the outcome of executing a system or a process. Understanding these systems are key to finding sustainable practices in customer service that provide motivation for a company to excel. In a business, ‘being number one’ is the outcome of customers choosing your company over others and differentiating yourself through excellent customer service. You achieve that by being better at understanding your customers and obsessing about serving them, not by obsessing about the competition.