Customer centricity is vital to business survival in today’s marketing landscape but what does the term really mean and can a brand ever truly lay claim to it? Melanie May investigates
Giving customers what they want may not be the quickest way to make money, but this, in the age of the empowered buyer, is increasingly becoming key to long-term business survival. Yet while customer centricity has become a popular buzzword, few businesses are currently accomplishing it.
Put simply, it means placing customer needs at the heart of a brand’s offers and communications. As Marcel Holsheimer, vice president, worldwide demand generation, enterprise marketing management, at IBM Unica Solutions says, “It’s about looking at customers individually, asking ‘what is the best offer I could make to that customer now’, and working to maximise the likelihood of a response to that offer.”
And as brands in all sectors grow ever more concerned with winning the loyalty of this new generation of buyers, achieving customer centricity is becoming an increasingly pertinent issue. For B2B brands it is arguably more vital because, in comparison to the direct relationship B2C organisations generally have with prospects, the B2B sales process is often longer and multi-layered.
Customer centric success
But while customer centricity is a challenge for many brands, some are forging ahead. IBM structures the sales side of its business to ensure that – as well as product experts – there is a dedicated team whose job it is to figure out exactly what its customers need and to help deliver it. With so much power in the hands of the customer, this has to be a key focus for brands says Holsheimer, “If you only have product experts, you’ll never be customer centric, and if you’re not meeting customer needs, they will switch off.”
As part of its overall customer centric strategy, Carlsberg went a big step further and developed a wide-ranging advice portal for its on-trade customers through its ‘We deliver more’ website.
The site adds value through offering customers a number of services you might not immediately link with a drinks brand, and crucially, it also delivers revenue. Carlsberg customer marketing director, David Scott, explains, “To do this successfully, a brand has got to have the insight, a real hunger to learn and understand what’s going on in its customer’s business, and the will and intent to do something about it.”
As the IBM and Carlsberg examples show, customer centricity requires B2B organisations to develop an in-depth understanding of both their customers’ wants and needs, and of how they feel towards that organisation’s offering, and then to use that information to target customers with offers relevant to them.
This requires B2B companies to capture data across every customer touchpoint, and then work out how to use it at the right time. The popularity of social media as a forum for both venting spleen and singing praise adds a further challenge for marketers, and B2B organisations now need to ensure they are gleaning data from the likes of LinkedIn and Facebook, as well as websites, blogs and traditional feedback channels.
“Customers make decisions based on emotion, largely based on the experience they’ve just had,” explains Rapide managing director Nigel Shanahan. “Advocates and detractors are born at the customer interaction point so brands need to ask customers what they think in real-time, and respond in real-time.”
Facilitating CRM
The technology is certainly there to accomplish this. Customer relationship management platforms such as Oracle’s Fusion CRM, and Rapide’s Rant & Rave technology that capture customer feedback in real-time via multiple channels, allow organisations to collect and leverage, data and customer insight to support a customer centric strategy.
Oracle places a strong emphasis on integrating social media and CRM applications both internally within the organisation, and externally via its solutions, enabling sales teams to gain and share information on customers instantly.
“The key issue for many organisations, who are already listening and engaging through social media tools is how they integrate and link the resulting media into their core CRM systems,” says Steve Fearon, vice president of application sales development at Oracle. “Achieving this ensures your team are always doing the right thing at the right time to address the customer expectations and offering a competitive advantage.”
The technology is also there to enable the targeted one-to-one communications necessary for a customer centric marketing strategy, and it doesn’t have to be expensive. Personalised URL campaigns are one example of this. They enable companies to engage with customers on a first name basis, and to tailor online content to the individual. Both offline and online behaviour can be monitored using a variety of tools and techniques and fed back into the sales function to direct the next wave of marcomms activity.
“Companies with an effective database solution and a degree of understanding about their market can develop effective customer centric media campaigns, implemented on a first name basis,” says Steve Dyer, MD at B2B agency Clockwork IMC. “People do business with people, and one-to-one promotional programmes are now possible on a scale that is cost effective and rewarding,”
Changing a mindset
So with all of this technology readily available, why are so many organisations still lagging behind? As discussed, one reason is the requirement to get to grips with social media data and all the challenges that entails. Another reason is adopting a customer centric strategy is a long-term play and for many businesses – where the focus is on achieving short-term sales targets – this is a hard sell. Embracing a customer centric strategy requires a significant step-change both in culture and structure. “Being customer centric doesn’t happen overnight and it requires buy-in from the whole organisation,” says Sarah Stratford, strategy director at agency Archibald Ingall Stretton.
This means choosing and using the available technology smartly. “Brands are entrenched in a pattern of behaviour and have already invested in traditional ways of trying to understand customers, such as customer surveys and focus groups,” says Shanahan. “The technology to respond to customers is there and can often be plugged in very quickly but organisations have already committed spend to different programmes, making it difficult to change.”
However, being customer centric offers great rewards for those organisations that embrace it. Not only can it increase revenue but it can enable brands to meet other objectives such as preventing dissatisfied customers from churning and therefore reducing spend on acquisition. Clearly then, when done properly, customer centricity and making money can go hand in hand, as the experience of Carlsberg shows. In fact, it is fast becoming the key to business success.
What defines a B2B customer centric organisation?
1. Insight at an individual level of each customer’s business, as well as an in-depth knowledge of the customer’s own particular needs, wants and issues.
2. n understanding that products are bought, not sold. Companies need to keep an eye on the gap between customers’ identified needs and wants, and the advances in technology that will enable them to deliver a competitive advantage. If the gap is too big, the sales process becomes harder, and more expensive.
3. Provision of clear channels on- and offline for customer and prospect feedback with systems in place to analyse this information and respond in a timely and relevant fashion.
4. Purchasers of B2B products and services have their media channels of choice. They prefer some channels for market and supplier information, and others for conducting their daily business. A customer centric brand must identify these channels to increase the effectiveness of the promotional pound.
