Why has customer centricity continued to gain popularity in marketing? Marketing leaders know that customer centricity is a way of doing business that fosters a transformative customer experience at every stage of the customer journey -- and it's a method that gets results. In fact, McKinsey found that companies with a customer-centric, data-driven approach achieve revenue gains of 5-10% and reduce costs by 15-25% within two or three years.
Here's a look at how a customer-centric business approach impacts the effectiveness of your organization's marketing efforts.
Customer centricity must be an organization-wide approach
To be a successful business method, customer centricity must be an organization-wide approach that puts the customer at the center of every organizational decision (rather than, for example, being product- or sales-focused). This is done by:
- focusing on the needs and wants of customers when planning and executing customer journeys
- recognizing that each customer is unique and has different behaviors and preferences
- connecting with customers at every touchpoint and building long-lasting relationships based on everything you know about them
It also means reorienting your organization from the customer out with new processes, company culture, and technologies across all teams that optimize an end-to-end customer journey. That way, rather than focusing on individual touchpoints in a one-off effort to optimize each, a customer-centric approach spans a progression of touchpoints and has a clearly defined beginning and end.
The Harvard Business Review has a well-known ‘how-to’ on building a customer-centric culture across an organization. But if you’re a marketing leader, what you really want to know is, “How can my marketing team use a customer-centric approach to get better results?”
How does customer centricity lead to greater success in the Marketing department?
It starts with data. Data is a cornerstone of a customer-centric strategy and successful businesses utilize data-driven approaches in all their marketing efforts. It’s impossible to be customer-centric if you don’t know your customer. And the best way to understand customers is via the data collected on them. Through detailed segmentation and analytics of your customer data, you can gain insights that offer a clear picture of who your customers are as individuals and as larger groups.
By analyzing existing data, you can also predict future buying trends and outcomes and make better, more customer-centric long-term business decisions. And technology, such as a customer data platform (CDP), can make this data analysis simple and effective (more on this below).
Personalization should be at the heart of customer-centric marketing
Want to increase customer satisfaction and loyalty? Then, use those data insights we just talked about to personalize every aspect of the customer experience (in-store, online, etc.). This is a truly customer-centric strategy. You can use your data to track each customer’s behaviors and interactions with your brand, and then build content, outreach and engagement campaigns that provide them with their personalized ideal shopping experience – across all channels.
Personalized interactions help to create positive and lasting connections with customers. Research by Accenture found that 91% of consumers are more likely to shop with brands that recognize them, remember them, and provide them with relevant offers and recommendations.
The right tools play a major role in creating a customer-centric experience
Turning customer data into personalized experiences across multiple channels doesn’t have to be hard. Start by determining the systems needed to analyze your data and to be able to fully and flexibly act upon it. This is where the right CDP is critical in helping you turn your marketing data into a customer-centric marketing strategy.
The right CDP, such as the QuickPivot Customer Data Platform, can seamlessly integrate with the rest of your marketing stack and help you create unified customer records, perform more meaningful customer segmentation, and carry out enhanced targeting and personalization. Together, these things all ultimately lead to more effective marketing campaigns. If you’re looking for a way to achieve the promise of customer centricity, a CDP could be the missing piece that your marketing team needs to take its customer-centric marketing efforts to the next level.
The takeaway
Connecting with customers and building long-lasting relationships with them is more important than ever in these days of economic uncertainty, and this is precisely what a customer-centric approach is all about. Smart marketers should be using their customer data to personalize customer experiences across channels and optimize the customer journey – and ultimately improve sales and ROI.
Is your organization struggling to shift its marketing strategy to a customer-centric approach? Reach out to us today to learn how QuickPivot’s customer data platform and services team can set you down the right path.
