What matters in times of economic recession (it starts to get better here and there!), shifting communication paradigms and all the other marketing, communication, media, sales and buying trends we see happening around us?
That we try to have a holistic view on our customers (including the internal customers like employees) and our business ecosystem and that we strive to be truly customer-centric.
It’s looking at things from a broader perspective (where do we fit in, what do we stand for, who are we having conversations with) and at the same time having more personal relationships.
In the first place relationships with our customers of course and conversations with customers only work if we know where they are in their buying process.
It is obvious that the way we can achieve all this will depend a lot of the type of business we are in (B2B versus B2C), our industry and so much more.
And we also know this isn’t new.
Customer Relationship Management vendors were promising a holistic view on the customer lifecycle before the internet became widespread. They couldn’t fulfil their promises though. Now they can, the technological barriers are gone.
It's not about technology; it's about management, processes and people
Aren’t we all customer-centric? The answer: no, definitely no. Being customer-centric isn’t about implementing systems and hoping the rest will follow. Than what is it about?
- Management, implementing processes and changing the corporate culture
- Getting the right people and customers around the table to create multidisciplinary teams to take crucial decisions
- A complete and radical change in the way we work, communicate and do business
- Getting rid of the artificial walls between marketing, sales, after-sales and what not
It’s about building stories, marketing campaigns, sales strategies, stores, websites and so on that are structured around the customer’s buying cycle and his behaviour and needs, instead of around your business and products.
But most of all it’s about truly listening to and speaking to the customer in his and her voice.
The customer is a fiction. Only people exist. People buy things. Your customers are people. Your company in the end is a bunch of people.
Survival is change
Change doesn’t come rapidly. It requires time and much effort. If you don’t start by changing the corporate culture towards a customer- and data-driven model, you better forget all the rest.
We all like to say our companies are customer-centric (“look at how we integrated all our systems”). It’s not true. How customer-centric are your finance people or the guys and girls that work in your warehouse? Do you use common metrics to analyze your business and your communication efforts? Do you really listen to your customers in every contact your company has with them? When the products they purchased are not doing what they should? Think about it.
In the end it’s all about doing the best you can to change (how you think and work), about being humble (and dropping the corporate talk), about realizing and accepting the rules have changed (and they have changed), about conversations (talk the talk people talk and most of all, listen), about seeing change as an opportunity instead of a threat and about looking at your business from a much broader perspective.
Let us end with a quote: "It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent, but the one most responsive to change (Charles Darwin)".
Why should you respond to change? Anticipate!
Jean-Paul De Clerck is a 360° interactive marketing consultant, founder of the Fusion Marketing Experience and owner of conversionation. You can connect with him via Twitter.
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