How to Become a Customer Centric Company

On December 1 2016, I attended the annual STIMA Congress and got to listen to Dominique Vercraeye about customer centricity. Dominique is a market researcher by heart.

He wanted to explain to us, the whole community of marketers, why customer centric companies are todays winners. And why this kind of companies or mindsets will be even more valuable in the future.

His beliefs

“Marketing is too important to leave in the hands of marketers : According to Fournaise Marketing Group, 80% of CEOs admit they do not really trust and are not very impressed by the work done by marketers – in contrast, 90% of these CEOs do trust and value the opinion and work of CFOs and CIOs. This attitude towards marketers has to change.” – The Guardian

Market researchers study people like you and me, which decisions we make and what motivates us to make those decisions.

They are business consultants with a double role. On one hand, they should ask the right, and sometimes hard questions, and play their role as challenger. But on the other hand, they also should propose solutions.

Reality shows us that our digital world offers a lot of opportunities, but most of the time we are too scared to seize them. Next to that, we have to cope with lack of faith in marketers as well as respect for our contribution to our business’ success.

So, after 30 years as a market researcher, Dominique has formed 4 basic beliefs:

1. Marketing is not communication.
2. Marketing should grow companies.
3. Marketing should focus on winning (from) clients.
4. By creating values which matter and where clients are happy to pay for!

How to be a winner, and not a loser?

Following his beliefs and the results of a large B2B market research, Insights2020, he presented 10 success factors to have a successful company in a digital and connected world.

To obtain these insights, they compared overperformers (who grew significantly faster than average) to underperformers (who grew significantly slower than average).

All overperformers had one key success factor in common: customer centricity. Now what are the main drivers of customer centricity, and how can we obtain it?

Dominique and his colleagues constructed a model containing the 10 most relevant success factors for Customer Centric Growth, divided into 3 dimensions.

First dimension: Total Experience
This dimension is the most external one: don’t just bring a service or product to the client, but a complete experience.

1. Are you purpose-led?
2. Do you implement data driven customization successfully?
3. Do you strive for touch point consistency?

Second dimension: Customer obsession
How should you transform your company to get to customer centric success? What is your mission: what solution should you offer for your client’s problem?

4. Customer centricity is embraced by all functions.
5. Leadership priority: are all your KPI’s and objectives in function of your mission, customer centricity?
6. Collaboration: do you work together efficiently?
7. Experimentation. “The learning is in the action, and the action is in the learning.”

Third dimension: Insights engine
Data are very important, but you should use and implement them in a right way.

8. Leading role of I&A (Insight & Analytics): I&A are always present when big decisions are made.
9. Unlocking the power of data: are you linking different data sources to distill insights?
10. Do you have the critical capabilities to grow, like for example business sense, ‘wholebrain’ thinking & storytelling?

WDMD: What Did Marriott Do?

Dominique gave a good example of a company that used this model to turn their bad satisfaction and retention rates around in just 2 years’ time. How did they do that?

1. Customer centricity outsourced to I&A. They began by analyzing all client data available through their hotel chain’s loyalty cards.
2. Customer stewardship with customer facing functions: ALL departments and ALL staff got training on customer centricity.
3. Customer centricity in all functions, processes and decisions: Everyone working at Marriott got access to client data relevant for their functions.
4. Seamlessly aligned with external partners: This is the most difficult to achieve, but they tried to align their customer centricity vision within all internal AND external partners, like for example airlines.

Conclusion

Transform. Because customer centricity isn’t an option, it’s a necessity if you want to grow. Marketers and insights managers COULD play a role in this transformation process.

The opportunity is now, so take it! And start by implementing following small changes:

• Focus on the whole experience, not only products and services.
• Do not focus on the details of data, but on the actionability of it.
• Manage risk, but experiment.
• Do not just deliver to customers, co-create and innovate together with them.