Accelerating business through customer centricity

Customer centricity is a reflection of our culture, process, customer experience, customer friendliness and customer satisfaction surveys. It is also an association of our product and quality services offered to our long-standing customers. According to a recent research, 89% of businesses are soon to be expected to compete mainly on customer experience. This approach will surely lead to the end goal which every company tries to achieve - ‘to maximize shareholder’s value’.

There's a big difference between customer centricity and good customer service. For example, customer service is to help a distressed client with your product or service, but customer centricity is more than providing good service, loyalty rewards, and special promotional offers. It is to identify the most valued customer, get a clear understanding of their requirements and delight them based on their behavior. Also, our services should fit-in as a solution to the customer’s existing eco-system. We need to bring their views to the service COE (Center of Excellence), create value for them, generate revenue from them, and find more customers like them.

Nowadays, the business process is changing dramatically, and one will find a vast difference between the modern and traditional way of doing business. End customers are more attracted towards the customer centric companies, where they get personalized services, offerings, and where their relationship is recognized and rewarded.

Customers are willing to build long-term relationships with their providers, but the experience that they gain, decides the long-term relationship. For example, the limited taxi access and fare control has sidelined the traditional taxi business and not the taxi services like Uber. There are a few common problems with traditional business models, which include limited hours of customer service, non-personalized offerings, cost and human dependencies, and untraceable services.

Today's customers are very different in their outlook, they are more resilient, adaptable and tech savvy than their older counterparts. They are dealing with smartphones, IoT devices, and social media. They are very upfront and do not hesitate to give their feedback and reviews on social media platforms. This high volumetric customer data that comes from enterprise applications, CRM and other social media platforms, can play a crucial role in understanding and unfolding the behavioral insight, sentiment analysis and paying attention to the voice of the customer.

Organizations that take customer experience seriously will stand out and win loyal customers. Nowadays, most of the quality management system (QMS) redefine quality by emphasizing on customers' expectations and satisfaction. They are currently switching from product or service-centered approach to a customer centric approach. Because, completely satisfied customers will speak good things and be a ready reference for the other customers. It also helps in business continuance, reducing churn and increasing revenue.

Big data and statistical techniques can facilitate enterprises that offers comprehensive powerful and actionable insights into 360° customer view, customer classification, and sentiment analysis. Analytical and statistical modeling allows an organization to forecast all portfolios and probable losses. Below are some of the key drivers:

* Identify relevant cross and up-sell opportunities

* Targeted marketing campaigns to acquire new profitable customers

* Enable the organization to understand risk dimensions faster without expanding the pool of human resources

With limited understanding of technology stack and a lack of data-centric culture being the barriers, companies should rethink and adopt the customer centric service and understand the power of data. They need to incorporate cutting-edge technologies to get interesting data and figure out ways to use customer data in the customer acquisition journey.

Susheel Sharma
Sr. Project Manager - Business Intelligence & Analytics, 3i Infotech