Customer Centricity: The Winning Formula For Change

Our recently launched Advisory Team helps businesses to succeed by becoming more customer centric, taking clients on a path to growth by leveraging STRAT7’s award-winning consumer strategy, insights and analytics.

In this week’s blog, we unpick why keeping on the front foot matters more than ever, what we mean by ‘Always On Customer Centricity’, and how businesses can take a read on their own customer centricity maturity.

The change challenge:

Consumer preferences are changing faster than ever. We have previously explored some of these shifting market dynamics including how consumers are responding to the cost-of-living crisis, the downturn of Black Friday and the growing prevalence of ESG strategy.

For businesses it is a constant struggle to respond and stay ahead of the competition. In PWC’s recently published Global CEO survey (4,410 responses from 105 countries), it was cited that changing customer preferences was the key challenge to profitability. Over half (56%) stated that they believed it would have a large/very large impact upon profitability in the next 10 years.

The risk of not adapting to change, or moving in the wrong direction, is significant. When change is exponential in its pace and multi-dimensional in its impact on businesses, you need to always be one step ahead. But we are firm believers that change can also present significant opportunity. Companies can achieve enduring success by understanding, predicting and acting on change. This is where ‘Always On Customer Centricity’, comes into play!

What is Always On Customer Centricity?

At its simplest, ‘Always On Customer Centricity’ means putting the consumer at the heart of business decision making.

Many businesses invest heavily in insight, run expensive trackers, and have huge digital databases of their customers. However, the data is often disparate across the organisation and does not reach the board room. As a result, big decisions are made on the back of operational and commercial metrics, without a clear perspective of the end consumer.

Elevating customer understanding to the boardroom and making it pervasive throughout the organisation is key to success. This requires a transformational shift to capture, understand and act on customer needs and behaviours both at pace — with a high frequency and short lead times, and at scale — in a connected way across the whole organisation and its processes.

In its ultimate state, a truly mature customer centric organisation achieves this! Whether designing a new product, planning a new marketing campaign or building scripts for customer service teams, every action is fuelled by accurate customer insight, and aligned through a shared vision of who the customer is and what they want. It means you’re consistently delivering value and staying ahead of the competition.

In short, Always On Customer Centricity takes you further with insight that helps you rapidly change gear and seize opportunities. And if you still need convincing, 89% of companies that lead with customer experience perform better than their competitors.

How do you know how customer centric your organisation really is?

We can help you systematically assess the extent to which you are putting the customer at the heart of decision-making.

At the highest level, ask yourself these four questions:

1/ Who are your customers? 

And do you really understand what they do, what they value and how much they are potentially worth to you?

2/ How do you find and attract them? 

Where are your customers? How can you be relevant to them? Does your brand and products do the job? And how can you convince them to choose you and not your competitor?

3/ How do you serve and retain them?

Do you have enough insight to create world-beating customer experience. One that treats consumers like individuals and gets better with every interaction to drive sales, loyalty and retention.

4/ How are you set up for execution?

Do you have the right vision, processes, organisation, systems, performance management, governance and shared knowledge to use all the insights you can generate?

The journey to becoming truly customer-centric is not an easy one ensuring the right strategy, plans and operating model are in place to capitalise on the opportunities change presents can be complex.

STRAT7 Advisory can deliver the right expertise, technology and strategy consultancy to assess, identify and prioritise the most appropriate steps to get you there.

If you’re looking for a partner to help your company on your ‘Always On Customer Centricity’ journey, please do get in touch.