The C-word is no longer something that should be whispered, customers are front and centre of marketers’ minds. Maxine-Laurie Marshall asks CMOs how they are becoming customer-centric
Customer centricity. You know it’s important. You say you’re customer-centric. Well, you think about your customers every now and again, and you did respond to that customer query on Twitter the other day, that counts right? Not really. But it’s okay, it’s a big challenge and one that needs the entire organisation to be bought into it. Speaking about the problem of becoming customer-centric, Victor Milligan, CMO of Forrester says: “Many marketing shops operate with the product(s) or brand(s) at the centre of their universe – siloed around functions that do not relate to customer journeys and experiences. Others do not have the necessary analytic and system skills needed to understand how to improve customer experiences, nor do they have customer-obsessed cultures.”
Offering advice to other marketing leaders, Nicholas Carlson, CMO at The Access Group, says: “Being ‘customer-centric’ means more than just catering to the needs and wants customers think they have. It’s creating value through understanding the markets and industries in which they operate, so that you are best positioned in the marketplace to correctly advise them.
“Only through effective communication, in particular listening to stakeholders in different parts of the business, can you help them achieve their short, medium and long-term objectives for their own competitive advantage.”
Advice is useful, but examples often inspire action. To give you a few recent examples of businesses becoming customer-centric we asked some B2B leaders the following question: ‘What are you doing to achieve customer centricity?’
Annabel Rake
CMO, Deloitte
Our clients are at the heart of everything we do. Ours is a business built on personal relationships and we work hard to make sure every interaction we have with our clients is meaningful.
As a first step, it is important to clearly define who your current and future clients are and what they are looking for from their relationship with Deloitte – both on an individual and an organisational level. Only once you have done this can you understand the best way to work with that client in order to suit their individual requirements.
We strongly believe that one person in our business should ‘own’ the relationship with each client, and that person is responsible for ensuring effective, consistent and bespoke communication throughout the relationship. Communication channels have grown increasingly complex and each interaction should be highly targeted to suit the client’s personal preferences. While digital channels play a role here – marketing automation (MA), for example, provides an intelligent system that ‘learns’ client preferences and enables an element of client ‘self-selection’ – there is no substitute for personal, face-to-face communication.
Finally, evaluating your relationship with the client on an ongoing basis is critical. There are many ways to do this, from MA reports to client feedback surveys, but the important thing is to make sure that what you are doing is really working – for both your company and your client.
David Chalmers
Marketing director,
Europe, Cvent
At Cvent we are heavily focused on customer centricity, putting our customers at the forefront of everything we do to ensure we acquire and retain customers who love the products and services we deliver. We have dedicated customer success managers who are assigned to each customer to proactively support their use of our solutions, and run regular user groups to educate customers on new features and products and gather feedback on our product roadmaps. We also recently launched our Cvent Customer Advocates programme, which offers an online community for customers to interact with each other and share best practices on how to get the most from our products. On the acquisition front, we are doing extensive persona research and development to drive our content strategy to ensure we offer the most relevant information to our different audiences.
Chas Moloney
Marketing director, Ricoh
Critically, the drive to customer centricity must come from the top. At Ricoh, it’s driven passionately by our CEO and the whole board.
To be truly customer-centric, an organisation has to position this concept at the centre of what it does and put in place initiatives and processes that employees will implement and follow, as well as feedback mechanisms. For instance, we have a customer join us at every board meeting either at one of our locations or at theirs. This gives us a chance to listen to them and understand what’s working well and what else we can do to add value to their business.
At Ricoh, ‘customer centricity’ is one of our brand values and employees are measured against this in their annual assessments. It is, as we call it, ‘The Ricoh Way’.
Jada Balster
Marketing director,
Workfront
At Workfront, everything from marketing and product development to customer success is built with our customers in mind. When we first sign a new customer, we establish benchmarks of success and the value Workfront should provide to their business. Each implementation is tracked against those metrics in order to ensure success. If our customers have any issues, questions, or requests with our product, we have a 24xfive customer service line that is staffed to answer anything from the most simple to the most complex questions. And because our customers asked for it, we hosted a user conference in Las Vegas last month to provide a forum for product training, best practice learning and networking. We are building the customer into the fabric of our company so that with everything we do, we’re asking: ‘What impact will this have on our customers?’
Marije Gould
VP of marketing, EMEA, Verint
As a company that provides customer engagement optimisation solutions, Verint knows it’s very important to practice what
we preach. The company is looking at different ways to improve customer
centricity. Here are three key initiatives that show how we are trying to put our customers – and their feedback – at the heart of our organisation:
Customer experience programme
Two years ago, Verint appointed a VP of customer experience who is tasked with finding out what our customers think about all aspects of their dealings with Verint; from the sales process, dealing with legal and pre-sales, to customer service, products, usability, consultancy etc. In addition to our standard post interaction surveys, we ask thousands of customers what they think in our bi-annual customer surveys. The customer experience team takes the feedback to our executive team and to various steering committees, who will address any underlying issues of dissatisfaction. They will also provide feedback to customers and share information about initiatives undertaken. This kind of customer experience initiative needs to have support throughout all levels of the organisation, and the customer experience team must have a clear mandate from the executive team. Our CEO and president are both key sponsors of this initiative, and demand regular updates on not only the survey results, but also on the resulting actions.
Buyer persona work
In order to get a better understanding of our customers and prospects, we have interviewed dozens of buyer types across Europe. This helps us better understand their needs, pain points, requirements, buying processes, and ultimately, it helps us provide more relevant information to each buyer-type at the various stages of the buying process.
Customer reference programme
and customer events
Our customers love to network and to interact with other customers (they tell us so, and so did the buyer persona work). To that end, we are, now more than ever, hosting regular user forums, customer days, roundtables and customer conferences. This gives them the opportunity to see best practice, network and engage with other users. In addition, our customer reference programme allows them to earn rewards for helping us out with reference requests, and gives us the chance to get closer to our customers. Our Customer Advisory Council takes this one step further: we give senior executives at our customers’ businesses the opportunity to provide input and thoughts into our product development plans and roadmap, in discussions with our product teams.
Cristin Riffle-Lash
VP of integrated marketing, Numerix
We just re-imagined our entire website with customer centricity in mind. We’re a B2B financial services tech company in a very small, niche space. Our expertise in this niche is our calling card because we help solve very complicated challenges. To focus on the customer, we’ve put our expertise and thought leadership content front and centre. We let them self-select their interests, as well as serve up relevant content through taxonomy-driven features on the back end. We’ve redesigned how we talk about our products to really focus on them as a solution ecosystem wrapped around the needs of the market place. It’s not just about what we do, but how that benefits the customer. We’ve created focused videos that we’re sending out to clients with new releases, talking about how we’re solving major challenges in the market place and how they can use our software to do it. And we’re surveying and engaging with our client base as often as we can to make sure what we’re building for them meets their needs.
Georgios Kolovos
Marketing director, EMEA and Asia Pacific, GE Capital
The increased customer demand for speed of service, customisation and multiple access channels can be seen as an opportunity for the B2B companies to reach beyond their current segments and expand their relationships beyond their existing customers. At GE Capital, this opportunity is seen through data and, to be more precise, what Gartner defines as ‘dark data’. This is the data that companies collect through interactions with their customers, it is processed and stored during regular business activities, but generally remains hidden and not used. GE Capital already has access to this source and has seen enormous opportunities for us to provide our customers with additional services and information that can help them address their business challenges.
