Customer Centricity

If there is one word that sums up the year we have just been through it would be ‘unpredictable’. I have heard it said again and again in every area of our customers’ and our own business.

A year ago, when I put together my round up of the year for the 2008 year end newsletter, the recession was really gaining momentum on the back of the credit crunch and we already faced a very difficult outlook. In 2009 with the recession in full-swing, business was in constant flux – one day there would be no projects underway the next there would be a half a dozen urgent propositions. Like every agency and consultancy in our industry, we had to become masters at expecting the unexpected and delivering great experiences for our clients. Read more…

This article, written by Neil Mason, was originally published on Clickz.com and is republished here with permission.
In my last column I discussed the need for organisations to develop a more customer centric approach to the development of their online channel and outlined a simple framework to help organizations improve the quality of the customer experience. Underpinning this framework is the need for a range of quantitative and qualitative measurement and analytical techniques as customer insight is a key component of delivering improved customer experiences. This time I’ll be taking a brief look at some of the tools in the customer experience toolkit. Read more…

This article, written by Neil Mason, was originally published on Clickz.com and is republished here with permission.

Over the past few weeks I’ve been exploring the use and applications of maturity models to help organisations understand where they are in their analytical capabilities and developing strategies and roadmaps for moving forward. In my own simple maturity model the third stage is customer centricity where the organisation moves from a focus on the site to a focus on the customer. It’s a move from process optimisation to customer optimisation. But why is customer centricity important, what does it means from an analytics perspective and what are the challenges involved? Read more…

This article, written by Neil Mason, was originally published on Clickz.com and is republished here with permission.

When is a visitor not a visitor? The answer is… “when it’s a cookie”.
The controversy surrounding one of the core metrics of web analytics, Unique Visitors, has raised its head again. In a recent blog post Eric Peterson, the web analytics consultant and author, called on the web analytics industry to stop using the term Unique Visitors because it doesn’t accurately reflect what is actually being measured. The issue stems from a set of proposed definitions from the IAB on audience reach metrics, including Unique Visitors. The definition of Unique Visitors from the IAB is different to the definition commonly used in the web analytics industry which is cookie based. Read more…

When talking to businesses about measuring their digital marketing performance, the approach I often use is a simple three-stage maturity model as follows:

• Firstly, put in place an effective performance tracking capability. It’s important that the business is clear about what it needs to measure and what tools it needs to put in place to conduct that measurement
• Next, once the organisation is happy that it is measuring the right things, it must capitalise on that knowledge by using it to optimise online business performance, maximise the effectiveness of campaigns, develop lead generation and convert sales or other opportunities. At this stage, the organisation is still primarily website centric
• Finally comes the transition to customer centricity, which sees the organisation spend less time thinking about how to optimise its site for business, and more discerning how to enrich the whole customer engagement experience and lifetime value of individual customers

A customer centric organisation is primarily concerned with how its website can fit in and around the broader relationship with its customers. Most organisations actually prefer online transactions, as they’re cheap to process. But that’s not to say the same companies aren’t interested in getting as much value from their customers as possible, by catering for their needs through multiple channels. Many reasonably forward-thinking organisations operate multiple channels without actually being cross-channel. To become truly cross-channel they need to fully integrate these separate knowledge silos and create a joined-up view of all ‘touch points’ with customers. Customers should be the primary entity the business is focused on, not the product, the service, the order or whatever else.

Has the organisation developed a view of the customer relationship that spans more than one channel? Are, for example, its call centre customer records integrated with stores and across online services? The challenge of customer centricity is to be able to measure and understand the behaviour of customers across those multiple channels. This requires a fundamental shift in philosophy, business processes, and the way in which organisations measure their success.

Meeting such challenges requires organisations to join up their data in order to be able to better track customers. Other obstacles to overcome include ascertaining exactly whose job this is, who owns the customer within an organisation, and convincing the wider business to recognise the longer term return on investment of uniting disparate customer information silos. It is sometimes difficult, for example, for a shop floor manager to see the role the web plays in driving sales to his aisles. But if a customer does business through more than one channel, it’s generally thought that they will prove more loyal and, ultimately, more valuable.

Of course, none of this change in thinking is easy, but there are methodological approaches that can be taken, specific to different business sectors and individual organisations, for any business that has realised the need to tackle the issue and become more customer centric. It’s about putting effective frameworks in place, helping businesses think through their future strategy for measurement, spotting issues early, offering practical guidance for overcoming the challenges of data integration, and looking beyond the present to plan for a future of customer centricity.

 This article, written by Neil Mason, was originally published on Clickz.com and is republished here with permission.

Jim Sterne, the author and Chairman of Emetrics, was in London last week and I had the opportunity to catch up with him at our offices. During our conversation we talked about the way that the market is developing and what the differences were (if any) between what is happening in the digital marketing optimisation space on my side of the Atlantic compared to his. As we were talking I kept thinking back to a simple model that I developed a number of years ago to describe where organisations are in the development of their digital marketing measurement and optimisation capabilities. These days it would be fashionable to call it a “maturity model”.

My simple maturity model has three main stages:

• Performance tracking
• Process optimisation
• Customer centricity

Performance tracking

In the first stage of their development organisations are focussed on performance tracking. The challenge here is to “get the right numbers right”. This is laying the foundations for further capabilities to be developed and the main activities revolve around deifying the needs of the business, setting success criteria such as Key Performance Indicators (KPI’s) and getting the right measurement technologies in place and getting them working properly. This will involve a lot of effort with specification and configuration issues.

At this stage in the model, organisations might be wondering whether it’s all worth it. The “effort to insight” ratio is high. The amount of value being gained from the data may seem to be low compared to the amount of heavy lifting required to get it. However, it’s vitally important that this bit is got right otherwise it’s hard to move from this stage of the maturity model to the next.

Process optimisation

Once the right numbers are right, organisations can start to use the data to make better decisions. The application of insight into the business creates an opportunity to optimise processes and to begin to create some return on investment in the putting the measurement capabilities in place. So the focus shifts from tracking to optimisation of the core digital marking processes such as acquisition and conversion.

The process of optimisation is driven by the “test, learn and adjust” approach and requires more than just good data and some smart technology. It also needs the right organisational culture backed up by sounds business processes. These processes needed to be embedded into the organisation during the Performance Tracking phase and they guarantee data integrity. Nobody likes making decisions on dodgy data and you can’t optimise marketing processes without making decisions about what’s working and what’s not.

Customer centricity

During the Process Optimisation stage, organisations still tend to be quite “site centric”. They are focussed on how to optimise a series of processes, tweaking conversion rates, improving satisfaction scores and so on. The next stage in the model is moving from being “site centric” to being “customer centric”.

The main difference I think is the difference between asking what the conversion ratio was last week and asking how many new customers there were last week and what’s their expected value in the future. Customer centricity is about looking at the digital channel in the context of an organisation’s overall relationship with the customer rather than the other way around.

The main challenge here is to be able to get a multi-channel perspective on the customer. To do that you need multi-channel data, bringing together where possible data from offline systems and online systems.

The conclusion I came to from my conversation with Jim was that the difference between what is happening over here and what is happening in the US is essentially down to the distribution of where organisations are in the maturity model. There are some companies in the UK and the rest of Europe doing some really interesting stuff, it’s just that there are more of them in the US. But that’s OK, sometimes it’s best to go second, you can learn quicker that way!

Video interview with Jim Sterne

By David Bomphrey

The Times Online recently reported findings from a study that showed that millions of people are likely to cut spending on insurance this year as the recession bites into household budgets. In particular, it stated that consumers would reduce cover levels or cancel policies on home insurance despite the risks. Read more…