There is no quick fix to becoming customer centric

Ever since Tesco started to dominate the loyalty scene and wow the grocery sector with its impressive growth, the concept of putting customer analysis at the heart of the business to drive decision-making has become a leading philosophy in consumer facing businesses. The idea is that by understanding your customers’ behaviour you can re-engineer all aspects of your business around your customers’ needs, from product ranges and store design through to targeted loyalty marketing.

Unfortunately for most businesses, this concept has remained a philosophy and not much more. Implementing a customer centric strategy may sound straight-forward , but all too often the results leave a little to be desired.

In our experience implementing a customer centric strategy in a business is a bit like starting up a new hobby or pastime such as learning to play a musical instrument. If you want to be any good, you have to start at the beginning, learn the basics with some simple tools and then practice, practice and then practice some more. As you get more accomplished you will progress using better tools and equipment to produce more sophisticated work, until you move into the professional realm and acquire yourself a Stradivarius.

The problem with many large organisations is that they behave a bit like the spoilt child who tells mummy that he wants to learn a new instrument and has to have all the best equipment way beyond his capabilities. There is a brief flush of enthusiasm, but ultimately it transpires that the passion was never really there, too much effort is required to progress and little Johnny gets bored and moves on to the next newest fad.

The big organisation that is struggling to make any progress often falls into the little Johnny category. They’ve heard that customer centricity is the latest trend and have gone out and purchased a big shiny data warehouse, some great software at huge expense and bought into a cookie-cutter plan that promises to return 3% like for like sales in 12 months. Simple!

However, getting to grips with customer centricity isn’t just about building up a capability in customer analytics. Instead it is about understanding how the findings from the analytics can actually be used and deployed in the business. Becoming a customer centric organisation is entirely dependant upon the business’ ability to recognise where and how to change around the customer. This can’t be done by simply following copy-cat strategies or using cookie-cutter tools, just like you can’t fast track learning a new instrument.

• To become customer centric, organisations need to take into account a few key considerations that don’t always suit a quick fix approach.
• Every organisation is different structurally, politically and culturally so implementing change needs to be aligned with these factors. The tools you buy cannot deliver any change on their own.
• Every organisations’ customer base is different and behaves differently so it doesn’t follow that what works for your competitors’ customers will work for yours. Simply replicating the same analytics as your competitors won’t necessarily hit the mark

Each organisation has a very different strategy and plan to achieve that strategy. The relevance and applications of customer insight will therefore be very different in each case.

In our experience the businesses that are most successful in embedding customer analytics into their organisations are the ones that begin with a simple set of tools and focus on educating the business about who their customers are and how they behave. Armed with this basic knowledge the different parts of the business can then start to figure out for themselves how they want to apply the information they now have.

Again, it is a bit like learning the scales and chords on a piano so you can start to make your own music.