‘Customer-centric’ does not mean paint bull’s-eyes on their foreheads
We seem to read a lot of Forrester. I guess they have a focus on the sort of direct marketing / social media mash-up our customers are struggling to implement.
Anyway, the latest paper was a little closer to our roots; “Defining an Enterprisewide Customer Contact Strategy” from October 22 last year by Dave Frankland. The (mandatory) list, the “5 Building Blocks for an Enterprisewide Contact Strategy” seems to get it right;
- Customer-centric marketing culture
- Business process collaboration
- Technology as key enabler
- Analytics and segmentation drive the strategy
- Consistent measurement framework ties it all together.
Nods in agreement.
But hang on. Take another look at #1. Skipped over it like me; brain numbed by the sheer number of times you have read this business oxymoron?
Focus for a moment on these 2 rhetorical questions,
- How many marketers / product managers do you know who disagree with the need to be ‘customer-centric’? Most swear they already are. Focus groups to prove it.
- How many organisations do you know that actually ‘…manage P&L’s by customer groups…’ – the money where the mouth is test?
So what has changed except the level of marketing self deception?
Making each organisational silo (each product manager, each channel manager, ATL / Below The Line managers…) separately and independently customer centric does not really achieve the objective does it?
If you do it this way, the decentralised leave it to them way, the customer may feel she is now the bull’s-eye in several product manager’s marketing plan, but she does not feel the organisation is customer-centric i.e. has her interests at heart.
We contend that customers translate ‘customer-centric’ to ‘relationship’. They look for proof there is a relationship on offer in the relevance of your communications – this proves you are working at recognising and remembering them. This is a prerequisite for trust, but you can’t have a positive relationship with a supplier you do not trust to honour their promises. “In full, on price, on time, everytime” is mandatory (and sometimes enough for a relationship to exist).
Let’s make the anthropomorphic basis of this customer-centric strategy explicit; the plan is to make the organisation behave as a real individual person would. Customers have relationships with people, so the closer your company can emulate the behaviour of a person, the easier it is to build customer relationships. With your advocates – not everyone but much better than no-one. Relationships promote loyalty, loyalty increases positive customer behaviour including WOM… and you make more money, for longer.
This is one of the reasons we like ’social media’ marketing. It is conversational, 2-way, open… the style of marketing that makes relationships between people more likely.
Back to ‘customer-centric’.
If each product management (or channel) silo is open, conversational, remembers the customer- but independently of the others – the customer still thinks you have selective amnesia. You cannot have much of a relationship with someone who welcomes you as a close friend in the office but ignores you in the bar.
To be customer-centric the organisation needs a single customer view to match the customer’s single company view.
In social media terms this means juggling a single (but multi-faceted, those pesky customers are complex human beings) conversation across the many places customers want to converse with you. Behaving like a single person relating to them. This is where you must generally focus on your advocates and trust them to leverage the relationship through their networks in order to achieve scale.
Sorry, a little more complex than putting up a company blog we know – but that is not a bad start!
