You’re not as customer-centric as you say you are.

Reading time: 7 minutes

Ask any major international business, and they’ll tell you their strategy is to put the customer at the center of everything they do. But dig a little deeper, and you’ll find out that ‘customer centricity’ has a different definition in every department. And those individual teams aren’t communicating with each other as much as they should. VML has a clear roadmap that will take you from siloed attempts to synergized collaboration. We’ll show you how to become truly customer-centric.

Beyond the personas

Chances are, your Customer Experience team will answer the customer centricity question by showing you personas and analytics. They’ll tell you how many customers shop online, by mobile, and in-store. They’ll explain why a button needs to be placed in certain areas and how to ensure a smooth flow of supply and demand. They know what it takes to offer a great shopping experience. And this is an important part of customer centricity. But it’s not the only part. In fact, it’s only the beginning.

Ensuring a smooth User Experience and great Customer Service are just the beginning.

Behind the quotas

Ask your Customer Service team, and they’ll tell you they focus on customers every day. They’ll point to their KPIs and targets for call length and call resolution, and perhaps show you some survey data. They’ll explain their strategies for resolving issues and making customers happy by the end of the call. Without a doubt, this is an essential element of customer centricity. But unless your Customer Service team has a full view of every interaction every customer has with your brand, they’re only getting half the story.

Centric at the top

And let’s not forget the C-Suite. I’m willing to bet that the business is focused on acquisition. You want to get more customers, since more customers means more income, right? Not always, of course. A one-time customer who orders a sweater in two sizes and returns one has less value than a frequent customer who shops in-store and rarely returns. And yet, in most systems, these two customers are weighted equally. And that’s a key flaw in your business thinking.

The agency myth

So, your business may hire an external agency to run an acquisition campaign. They’ll do their research, create a campaign – usually including an incentive or discount – and launch it. At the end, they’ll report that the campaign had 10,000 clicks and ‘acquired’ 500 new customers. They declare it successful. But it’s important to investigate how many of those new customers bought once and never again. And how many of them returned their discounted product. Most importantly, you’ll want to know how many of them shopped again in the months after the campaign. Metrics like these can tell you if the campaign was truly successful or not.

Your acquisition campaign got 10,000 clicks and 500 new customers. But that doesn’t mean it was successful.

Aiming for CLV

Simply acquiring more customers won’t improve your business if those customers cost you more than they spend. So, instead of focusing on customer acquisition, you should be focused on Customer Lifetime Value. And that requires you to know and understand every customer’s journey with your brand. Not just online, but also in-store. Not just when they call to complain, but also what they post on social media about you. Not just one interaction with your brand, but every interaction with your brand. Getting a full customer view can show you where to focus your time and energy, and how to get the most out of every customer interaction.

Tech-centric vs customer-centric

It shouldn’t be surprising if your IT isn’t thinking about the customer experience yet. After all, they’re all about the tech. They can show you the capabilities and shortfalls of your current tech stack. They can show you where the data is stored and who’s using it. But they’ll also show you that the tech is as siloed as your company is. Marketing uses one system, Customer Service a totally different one. The data for your brick-and-mortar shops isn’t anywhere near the data for your online shop. And when a customer calls with a complaint, the agent on the line has no idea whether they’re a first-time buyer or a long-time fan. That’s not IT’s fault. It’s the fault of your siloed way of doing business.

Real customer centricity happens when you blend all these segmented activities into one, complete whole. And we can show you how.

The playbook for true personalization

VML’s Customer Experience (CX) playbook can bring all of these essential elements of customer centricity together. Because the truth is, real customer centricity is all of the things I’ve mentioned in this article. It’s UX and Customer Service. It’s strategy and tech. It’s data and customer interaction. It’s stitching all of these siloed activities together into a single, comprehensive whole. And it starts from the top.

More often than not, we see various teams introducing themselves to each other in our earliest meetings. They’ve never met before, because they’ve all been focusing on their own KPIs and goals. Our discovery phase is all about diving deeply. Into your business and your people. Your processes and your tech. VML’s roadmap will show you the power of blending them all together into a singular system that drives real growth. And

Bring your employees along on every single step of your journey. After all, you can buy all the tools and tech you want, run all the campaigns you can afford, use all the iPads and POS systems you can find. But if your employees find the tech clumsy, confusing, or hard to manage, they simply won’t use it. And if they don’t see your vision, they can’t share your vision. True customer centricity doesn’t happen in a vacuum. You must do it together.

At a Glance

Employee-centric = customer-centric

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Facing the facts

The truth is, you likely have many of the elements of an excellent customer experience. But they’re so fragmented and siloed, they simply can’t live up to all their potential. In my next article, I’ll explain how VML offers a structured and proven way to bring all of these individual pieces together into a comprehensive whole. So, you can finally become as customer-centric as you say you are. Stay tuned.