Achieving customer centricity is on all marketers’ wish-lists. Maxine-Laurie Marshall reveals the key to getting it right
‘The customer is always right’ is something we’ve all thought when dealing with a particularly rude sales clerk on a busy Saturday afternoon when they just aren’t giving our dilemma enough attention because the queue of customers is snaking around the store. So why, when we are no longer the customer, do we forget what it feels like to be a neglected customer? Customers should be central to your business; without them you won’t have a business for long. Customer centricity can be broken down into four key pillars: data, sales enablement, a selfless approach and customer retention. If you get these right your business should be well on its way to becoming customer-centric.
Data
Data has been the focus of marketing conversations since the dawn of time, but more so since it received a size attribution about five years ago. With this in mind it had to be the first pillar of customer centricity success. Without good customer data you won’t have accurate information about your customers, making it impossible to have any meaningful communication with them.
Gathering this data has to happen regularly as Deb Eastman, chief customer officer at Satmetrix, says: “Only listening to customers once a year is about as useful as only going to the gym once a year. The best programmes take a multi-touchpoint ‘customer journey’ focus to data collection, and collect data as regularly as possible.”
Sticking with the centralisation theme, Simon Robinson, senior director marketing and alliances EMEA at Oracle Marketing Cloud, advises marketers to also have centralisation at the heart of their data strategy. “This means breaking down silos and integrating data sources. Many of the tools and systems used to glean offline and online data have different integration points with different ways of putting data in and getting data out. To maximise the use, bring these points together and manage from one place. This will help you to identify the top data sources that define your best audience and prioritise getting those into the system.”
Managing and staying on top of the data you’re collecting is half the battle, the other half is doing something useful with it. Print and document management company Danwood uses a CRM system, Yammer – an internal social collaboration platform – and technology that allows them to monitor customers’ use of its machines (with customers’ permission) to collect and share customer data internally. While this provides the company with a ‘good data set in terms of understanding customers’ business behaviour’, Douglas Greenwell, Danwood’s marketing director, says: “What we haven’t quite done yet is taken that data in a cohesive way and put it in a really good portal that a customer can go in and interrogate and understand and get some value from. We want to start packaging that data up in a way we want to start sharing with customers, so they are able to benchmark their organisation.”
Not only can keeping on top of your customer data help you target them more effectively, but providing them with useful information will keep you front of their mind and keep them coming back to you.
Sales enablement
Collecting data is one thing, but sharing it with other departments in your organisation makes it exponentially more powerful. Breaking down departmental silos and encouraging all those with customer knowledge to share is a start. Danwood’s use of Yammer encourages this. Greenwell says: “We try and encourage behaviour in the same way people would think personally about social media, which is don’t overly worry if anybody wants to know this information but just post it up. If you think it’s useful somebody else is bound to think so as well.” He also highlights that all parts of the business have access to the CRM and are able to contribute to it: “It also links to our operational system so if there are/were service issues they can be made apparent in the CRM system. That ensures the sales team can walk in to a customer meeting and be more knowledgeable and not get caught out on an issue they were unaware of. We also make sure the sales team are buddied up with operational staff, particularly for our large accounts we would have sales and operations going in together.”
There is also an argument for creating, or giving greater focus to, a team dedicated to customer care. Chris Cullen, client services director at Echo Managed Services, says: “Perhaps it’s time to think more about how marketers can empower and really professionalise the one part of the business and the employees that actually engage with customers all day long – that’s the customer contact centre.”
Eastman believes customer contact teams should be positioned centrally to how the business is run rather than merely administratively. She also encourages organisations to let employees, not just management, know what customers think, so the organisation as a whole can change. She says: “Data democratisation is critical to driving cultural transformation. Get the customer out of the management report and into the frontline. Most employees don’t wake up in the morning with the goal of disappointing customers. Get them data so they can improve their own performance.”
Selfless behaviour
Orchestrating organisational change is our third pillar for customer centricity success, and arguably this is the hardest to get right. It isn’t a fast process, as Greenwell describes: “We think this is a two-three-year journey. Historically we weren’t very good at looking after our customers, we were a classic sales organisation where our view was about extracting value at that moment in time. The key catalyst for change was because the organisation realised it couldn’t carry on the way it was going, it needed to change itself to focus a lot more on customer satisfaction and retention.”
Changing the way the organisation thinks has to come from the top down and is a big strategic issue rather than a slight change. Doug Mow, CMO at Ness SES, reiterates: “All executives have to set the example with an absolute obsession with the customer experience. Cultural change will not happen without demonstrated behaviour at the top.”
Dennis Fois, CEO of Rant & Rave, believes the executives at the top of the business need to get used to including comments and feedback from customers at a board level discussion. He says: “Different board members may have opposing opinions but being able to use comment, direct from your customers as evidence for the case of getting something done is irrefutable.
“Sometimes things that seem urgent to the board are less important to customers and often the little things the company might not even be aware of or see as inconsequential are the biggest bug bears or the reasons why their customers keep coming back.”
Once the idea has been firmly accepted by the c-suite, disseminating that message down the ranks will be easier. Sometimes it takes a mistake for behaviour to be altered: Fois reveals Homeserve, one of Rant & Rave’s clients, was fined for mis-selling to its customers. After this it transformed the way it did business. Every employee is now encouraged to constantly ask themselves ‘Is this right for the customer?’ If a process isn’t deemed to be customer-centric then it’s changed.
Retention
You’ve spent a lot of time, effort and money to get your customers in to the heart of your organisation, but how do you keep them there? With the cost of acquiring new customers between four and 10 times more than the cost of keeping existing customers, retention rates should be the final pillar to customer centricity success.
Greenwell reveals retention rates are analysed at a board level on a fortnightly basis at Danwood. In order to lower rates the business has a team called ‘emergency love’: “As soon as we receive a termination request, it goes to the emergency love team. They are on the phone to do two things: one is to see if we’re able to change their mind. And if they are not retainable it’s to understand why they are going? We’re getting good results, we’re able to turn around two out of three cases.”
Fois advises marketers to make their customers feel valued by keeping them up-to-date with information relevant to them before they ask for it. He says: “Coupling this proactive approach with regular opportunities for customers to share their feedback means that you can keep one step ahead of their needs, the customer feels valued and the risk of them silently defecting is reduced.”
If you have the first three customer centricity pillars in place, the final one of retention should be the easiest to achieve. Retention should come almost naturally after the data to treat customers as individuals is in place, departmental silos are broken down and your people are sharing information and the business as a whole is talking about the customer on a daily basis.
If executed efficiently, turning your organisation in to a customer centric one will also bring marketing more central as this once outcast function is responsible for solving this big business issue. As Greenwell says: “The issue of retention, caring about your customers and generally understanding their business should be a number one priority for a marketer.”
