Customer Centricity

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.