“I’m not a number!” The road to customer centricity Part 1

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?

In the “site-centric” world we don’t really recognise visitors and customers as individuals, we see them as a number, hence the title of this piece taken from a cult TV programme from the 1960s called The Prisoner. In one famous scene the hero of the piece pushes back against the authoritarian environment that he finds himself in with the line “I am not a number, I am a person“. The sentiment is clear that over 40 years later we have to recognise that people are individuals with different aspirations, wants and needs and that we can no longer develop websites with a “one size fits all” user experience.

The problem is that we still get it so very wrong. When running workshops, seminar and speaking at conferences I often ask a simple question: “Who here hasn’t had a poor experience on the internet in the last couple of weeks?” No one ever puts their hand up. Either people they don’t understand the question…, or more likely because we all routinely suffer from poor online experiences. This might not be surprising; after all, digital marketing is still a relatively young industry. Brand marketing is over 100 years old, direct and catalogue marketing is well over 50 years old. Digital marketing is at best 15 years old and the reality is that whilst companies generally think that they deliver a decent service to their customers, their customers don’t. In our digital world the consequences can be disastrous. In their 2008 Customer Experience Impact report Right Now cited that 84% of people who’ve had a bad customer experience and tell others and claimed that 87% of people who’ve had a bad customer experience have stopped doing business with that company. Bad news travels fast.

So what’s the solution? I would argue that developing a customer centric view of the world is a massive step in the right direction. Customer centricity enables organisations to build better customer experiences and there is increasing evidence that links customer’s perceptions of their online experience with their loyalty and advocacy. In their report “Customer Experience Correlates To Loyalty“, Forrester found that across 12 different industries in the US that there was between a 65% to 76% correlation between a customer’s perception of their experience and the propensity to buy again. The evidence also suggests that this correlation is becoming stronger with the results generally up on the same study done the previous year. So customer experience is becoming more important and in this day and age we need to move away from the “one size fits all” approach and focus on developing better customer experiences through an understanding of who the key customer segments are, why they visit the site and what do they do when they get there.

The first thing to do is to work out where the organisation is currently in terms of understanding the current experience. Organisations at this stage may need to accept the hard truth that the baby is ugly, figure out where they need to be and then how they are going to get there. We’ve developed a framework to help organisations improve the quality of the customer experience along the following lines:

• Step 1: Understand
• Understand fully who your customers are
• Understand the nature of the current proposition
• Understand what data you have and what it is telling you
• Step 2: Define
• Define the experience(s) that you want to deliver
• Define the processes that will underpin that experience
• Define the measures by which the quality of that experience will be assessed
• Step 3: Improve
• Improve the quality of the experience
• Improve the effectiveness of the experience
• Improve the efficiency of the experience
• Step 4: Assess
• Assess the impact of the changes
• Assess the ROI of the changes
• Assess the learnings that have been made
• Step 5: Optimise

Obviously data and analytics are key to this process from understanding what needs to be done to determining whether it’s been successful or not. But it’s not all about “ones and zeros”, there’s a range of quantitative and qualitative techniques that are needed as part of customer experience toolkit. I’ll take a closer look at them next time. Till then…