Customer behaviours and expectations are changing.
With companies like Amazon, Uber and Netflix, expectations have grown and empowered customers are conditioned to demand great experiences with the brands they interact with at all touch points, putting increasing pressure on both B2B and B2C businesses alike to perform.
Services and products are no longer differentiators in why customers buy; the customer experience companies provide is.
Why Customer Centricity is Critical
According to Forrester, companies focused on their customer experience outperform competition by 14%, compounded annually.
Most organizations recognize the importance and value of good customer experience (CX), and aim to deliver a good CX, but they are struggling with how to do that.
A disconnect exists between the CX companies strive to deliver to its customers and the way businesses operate to support customer needs and expectations.
The problem is that companies are run according to their internally defined, company-centric, viewpoint which typically neglects to consider the customer’s perspective and what would make for a natural and seamless product adoption experience for the customer.
By forcing customers to conform to its procedures, companies effectively produce customer experiences in silos and disconnected to customer expectations.
Companies are inadvertently creating poor customer experiences and making it harder for their customers to adopt products and services.
For example, think of each time you phone into a telco company where information is provided to the automated call system, only to be asked for the same information again when connected to a person, or worse, again when passed onto another person. This is a poor customer experience.
Customer Centric Organizations Wins Hands Down
To meet the needs and expectations of today’s customers, organizations must operate and align around the customer or face failure.
That is, vendors need to understand what the most comfortable and relevant success path is for its customers (from their perspective), and then create the corresponding repeatable, prescriptive and scalable approach for driving that greater adoption experience.
If that adoption, retention and expansion journey for customers is as seamless and natural as possible, they will be more successful at using and leveraging the products and services, and quicker to recognize the value they are realizing from them.
How to consistently deliver a good CX, and in a manner that is most effective for the business, is thus about the company codifying its customer’s success path into an operational model that prescriptively manages customers through a repeatable customer journey.
Companies that operate in a customer-centric fashion learn, through regular observation of the journey, how to adapt to and anticipate the changing needs of their customers driving improved adoption and CX.
They also stay ahead of potential disruption because they will evolve their operations as their customer’s needs change.
As a result, customers receive a superior customer experience and the value they anticipated and desired not only when they purchased the product or service, but continuously as a customer.
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