Customer Centricity: Happy Customers, Happy Business

Peter Drucker wrote in his book The Practice of Management (1954) that ‘it is the customer who determines what a business is’. This sentiment still firmly holds true today, as consumers increasingly expect personalised shopping experiences from aspirational businesses that desire to have a positive impact on the community, country, or world in some way. Across this series of articles, Daniel Fitzsimmons explores the role of customer-centricity as a mechanism to support the delivery of superior customer experience and business profitability.

Following from the first article in this series, in which Daniel covered the basics of customer centricity and initial ways to implement it into your organisation, this article applies these premises to the development of actionable customer satisfaction.

Purposeful Value Creation

Purposeful value creation involves the increased alignment of an organisation to a broader societal cause to secure a positive association with potential customers. As ethical consumption becomes increasingly important to consumers, brands must be increasingly sensitive to not only profit generation, but also the nature of the profit being generated.

A customer-centric business purpose statement helps to project a company’s motives to prospective customers, and provides an impetus or bias with which to engage with your products or services. However, failure to fulfil a stated purpose can negatively impact brand equity, share prices, and future revenue generation, highlighting the need to embed purpose messaging within the fabric of the organisation.

Purposeful value creation represents a key informant to customer journey mapping, consumer touchpoint messaging, and the identification of what matters to potential clients. Through increased alignment to customer values, you are better positioned to define the customer journey through your organisation, and secure future access to the customer’s wallet.

Customer Journey Mapping

Sales funnel formulation and market targeting typically focuses resources and efforts on ‘top of funnel’ customer acquisition and the development of velocity around transaction creation. When considering customer-centricity, greater focus needs to be given to Post Purchase Management, and securing customer loyalty through an improved customer experience. Post Purchase Management supports the creation of brand equity, reputation, and future opportunities.

Effective customer journey mapping requires the identification of market segments, target consumers, and product positioning. Once you have identified targets, it becomes easier to map the offline-online interactions of target customers and how best to engage with each distinct customer persona, amplifying or quietening their voices as they contribute to business success.

Customer Satisfaction

Customer satisfaction and the creation of customer enjoyment should be at the forefront of your organisation’s culture. However, it necessitates a mechanism to collect and codify customer feedback related to the delivery of goods and services.

Various mechanisms exist to support customer satisfaction identification, including:

• Kano’s model for customer delight

• Net Promoter Score Measures, ie. the likelihood to which you would recommend a service

• Customer Effort Score, identifying the friction associated with engaging with a product or service

• ACSI Measures, which address a) Overall satisfaction, b) Expectancy disconfirmation, and c) Performance versus the ideal product or service.

While it is impossible to pick just one ideal method, and organisations will need to select a solution which best supports their insight creation process, we can confidently recommend the use of CSAT surveys as critical to customer-centricity and the provision of critical insights into products and services on offer.

Conclusion

When cultivating a customer-centric organisation, all ventures and operations should be directed towards the goal of customer satisfaction; inversely, you can be assured that your business is successfully customer-centric when you observe increased customer satisfaction. In this article, I have covered how best to integrate this goal into your business plan, ensuring it follows the same steps as your customer’s journey.

In the next and final article in this series, I take these basics and outline ways in which technology can be leveraged to amplify these goals.