Customer Centricity

Those of us who were around in the 90’s and early 2000’s will remember the focus that most organisations started to place on Customer Centricity. Suddenly everyone in the business had customers, not just the sales personnel who dealt with the buying public.

The realisation that every person in the organisation was producing an output, which someone else used and needed, meant that each of us had a customer to service; someone whose requirements we needed to understand, someone whose satisfaction was important, someone whose feedback mattered.

Organisations moved from being product centric, focusing only what they could make and sell, to also focusing on the relationships they had with the people to whom they wanted to sell, alongside efficiently building products.

The influence of the internet cemented the need for all businesses to focus on Customer Centricity. Customers could now get more information relatively easily:

Managing the end-to-end journey with relevant metrics, designing with the customer needs in mind, investing in the data to provide the feedback required, to keep improving, and reacting immediately when customers needed assistance, as well as measuring how well this is being done. We need data to understand all of these things, to determine how to create better value.

Having the information that enables you to understand the customer’s expectations, and then seeing these expectations as central to our strategies, marketing, process design etc. is key to making things easier for the customers in your target markets.

These developments, whilst strengthening Customer Centricity aims, triggered the beginning of what is going to be the next core focus - the information needed to support the development of effective customer-centric solutions, drove the need for this new discipline, Data Analytics.

The data is there, it exists and when it is accurate and reliable and correctly applied, it can be used at relatively low cost to create enormous value. The question of value is on everyone’s lips:

• Are we creating true value?
• Have we got the balance between customer delight and costs?
• Do the customers find it easy and simple to deal with us?
• Do our customers truly believe and trust in us?
• Are we meeting the legislative and ethical requirements in a way that is improving how we are perceived by the customers?
• Are we measuring all the outcomes we need to monitor?
• Are we getting the right results?
• Do customers feel connected to us?

To answer these questions with confidence, business managers rely on data, reports, dashboards, messages from their staff, and correspondence directly from the customers. All this information needs to be gathered, collated, cleaned and filtered where incorrect or inappropriate, analysed and understood, then turned into well designed objects of communication that all who need to use them can easily understand.

In the Information / Digital Age, with the era of Artificial Intelligence upon us, the shift to this focus is taking hold in the minds of all business people – this is Data Centricity. 

Data Centricity

Business leaders have realised that, just as retaining customers for their lifetime is a worthwhile goal, creating and retaining quality data, which can be used for the lifetime of the business & the customer, is a goal worth achieving; one that will provide significant benefit, which could be a differentiator in the marketplace.

Every one of us, every day, is now working with data, to produce information for our customers to use. Almost every person in the organisation is now required to regularly provide information products as part of their job. These outputs are then used by our direct customers to make decisions, whether that is internally in the organisation or externally as the end user.

Basic data related skills that enable one to:

• understand what information our customer needs,
• know what data needs to be used to provide these insights,
• ask whether there are any legal or ethical considerations that need to be considered,
• think about how to design for this, to be done cost-effectively and efficiently,
• create processes and systems across the organisation, not in silos, to gather and prepare this information,
• question what do we do automatically, and what do we need humans to do?

Creating customer and business value through data and information products, needs to be your top priority. How you treat your data will influence your competitive advantage. Everything you did for Product Centricity and then Customer Centricity, needs to be done with data at the centre.

One of the critical success factors is trust.

• Do the internal customers trust the data they are getting?
• Do the end-customers trust us with their data?
• Are we creating data assets, that can be used over and over again?

Data Centricity is not a technology issue; it is a leadership discipline. Questions to address:

• Are we eroding the power of our data or treating it as a strategic asset?
• Are we designing around data or addressing it as an afterthought?
• Do we really treat data as an asset - is it owned, do we handle it with the same care, as we would one of our other assets?
• Do we focus on value creation, to guide how we get and maintain information, as opposed to amassing volumes of data.

If you think about what is required, you will realise that the organisations who have mastered Customer Centricity, have also addressed Data Centricity. They are truly data-driven, in the way in which they design and operate their business, they manage data so that the organisation can act to meet the customer’s needs.

The data foundation supports the business objectives, one of which is customer service. The organisations that win in the next decade will not be the ones with the most data, the most dashboards, or the most advanced tools. They will be the ones that focus on Data Centricity:

• Treating data as a shared asset
• Designing data around value and outcomes
• Governing data to earn trust
• And placing humans, not systems, at the centre of decision-making.

Customer Centricity or Data Centricity? – the answer is both - integrating data-driven analytics into customer-centric business models and processes will get you the results you need.

Data Centricity focuses on how decisions are enabled, scaled, and trusted, while Customer Centricity focuses on who we serve.