Customer Centricity Event – Key take-outs

Thank you to everyone who came along to the Customer Centricity event on Friday 29 June. Our focus for the event was Customer Centricity, putting your customer at the heart of your business and knowing your niche. We heard from some great speakers: Paul Stephen from Sagittarius, and James Marshall from Microsoft who joined our Director of Consulting Graham Halling to talk on the subject, Stephen Gilbert did an excellent job moderating the event.

Ex Director of Marketing at Money Supermarket and CRM/Digital Transformation Expert – Stephen Gilbert introduced the topic of Customer Centricity and promised an unbiased view as the moderator for the event.

First we heard from Graham Halling who opened up a fantastic and very relevant quote from Sam Walton: “There is only one boss. The customer. And he can fire everyone in the company from the chairman on down, simply by spending his money somewhere else”.

The key messages from Graham were:

• Customer Centricity is not a project; it doesn’t have a start and finish.
• Customer Centricity is a culture and an overarching approach to doing business, so businesses should keep refining and listening to their customers, matching their needs and not their wants. For an organisation to excel as a customer centric organisation they must be understanding and anticipating the needs of tomorrow not the need of today.
• Ryanair – as some in the room for our event last week were surprised to hear (and challenged – which we love!), is a customer centric organisation. Being Customer Centric is about answering the needs not wants of your customers. We might want larger seats, more leg room, free drinks but really all we need is low cost, easy to access, regular European flights from many UK regional airports. *Ryanair is now the fifth largest airline on the planet. (quote from The Telegraph Oct 17).

In summary Graham closed by saying that Customer Centricity is knowing that there is a difference between what the customer needs and what the customer wants.

Paul Stephen up next continued on this track: focusing on Customer Centricity is about really knowing your customers. What does the data tell you about your customers as individuals? How do you become more profitable as a business, and what can you do in an ecommerce environment?

Increase visits to a website –>                   High investment activity for minimal output or return
Increase your prices –>                               Could some customers away
Increase your conversion rates –>            Build revenues

Make things more relevant by:

• Segmenting email
• Personalise throughout the customer journey

Even if you start with segmentation instead of personalisation that is a good place to start. There isn’t just one customer journey, there are many, creating a challenge for many marketers

Customer Centricity is closely linked to  Customer Experience – improve the experience and it will improve results in your business and increase brand love from your customers.

Finally, we heard the vendor view from Microsoft’s James Marshall. The pace of change is astonishing. The democratisation of technology is interesting and means that smaller businesses can access the same technology as the much larger organisations do.

3 things that help build better customer centricity:

Acquire
Know your customers – today and in the future! You need to listen to potential new customers.
Deliver and serve
Build better experiences – how do you give customers what they want?
Build for tomorrow
Attract new customers and keep focusing on the future.

What was made really clear during our Q&A is that Customer Centricity is data driven but should also be insight driven. AI is the future and it absolutely supports the customer centric approach.

START BY STARTING

Listen and know your customers – focus on them.

Remember, your customers are transforming without YOU!!

If you are keen to get a better insight from our experts, you can find our downloadable ‘Ask the Experts Report’ here. These include Disruption report, GDPR report and many more…

We would be happy to arrange a replay of the event content via web link or in a meeting for those who are interested to learn more. Please get in touch.