As recently as a decade ago, ‘business as usual’ meant that you developed a product or service, distributed it, waited for sales to roll in and thenmanagedyour customers using a sales force automation tool. The goals of CRM adoption focused on optimizing and automating business processes, particularly with the needs of executives in mind as they try to forecast the business and oversee their sales teams.
Cultivating a customer relationship mindset must become an integral part of strategic planning and operational reality.
Pexels.com
For 20 years this served as the dominant approach to customer relationship management. However, the market conditions that drove CRM to become the largest software market in the world have changed. Today, customers are in control. They have more choices than ever before and they command the conversation. Their sea of options and the always-on, instant-access nature of digital environments have reprogrammed customers with a new set of sky-high expectations.
Customers are not inanimate objects to be managed; they are active, savvy, discerning and fickle when it comes to brand loyalty. Customers expect you to anticipate their needs and orchestrate meaningful interactions that create real value for them—not just marketing and sales opportunities for yourself. And if their interactions aren’t personalized and unique, they will take their business elsewhere—in a heartbeat.
According to the research firm Forrester, “the only source of competitive advantage is the one that can survive technology-fueled disruption—an obsession with understanding, delighting, connecting with and serving customers. This means that effectively managing your company’s relationships with those who buy your company’s products and services has never been more important.”
The stakes are high in this new business reality. The challenges are immense, but so are the rewards for those who successfully navigate these changing dynamics. Businesses can meet the lofty expectations posed by modern customers by using a combination of culture and technology to improve customer relationships. In this article, I will focus on the importance of culture as a first step on the path to thriving in a relationship-first market.
Attributes Of Customer-Obsessed Companies
For companies to survive, cultivating a customer relationship mindset must become an integral part of strategic planning and operational reality. It’s not an accident that Amazon’s mission is to be Earth’s most customer-centric company. They understood the changing nature of customer relationships before anyone and built one of the world’s greatest companies as a result.
Customer obsession is not a one-off approach tucked away in the corner of a strategic office, executed in fits and starts. It must serve as the foundation of your entire company and drive decisions ranging from your go to market strategy, product development, customer support and post-sale project delivery.
Customer-obsessed companies share a number of attributes.
1) They are customer-led. To be clear, I don’t mean “led by the nose” following every one-off customer request they receive. Rather, these companies use customers as their North Star, the guiding principle that underpins every business process and activity. They understand not only what the customer is doing, but why. They then use these insights to create experiences that foster stronger customer relationships.
Most importantly, a customer-led culture will do the right thing for its customers. In the age of social media, customers are more aware of misdeeds than ever before and they have a worldwide audience to share their experience. Think of the recent negative headlines about certain airlines and consumer banks. These companies were not customer-led, and that culture permeated to mid level managers and front-line employees with disastrous results. Establishing a customer-led culture isn’t just a competitive advantage, it is table stakes for survival.
2) They are insight driven.“The three most important tools in your relationship strategy are data, data and more data,” according to Forrester. However,“only 29 percent of businesses say they are good at translating the result of data and analytics into measurable business outcomes.”
Collecting data isn’t enough. Data must capture decision-relevant information. You must analyze it, share it, derive insights from it collaboratively across organizations, and ultimately, make better business decisions based on those insights.
That is a tall order, and it is why you must first establish a customer-obsessed culture. Unless the entire company buys into the goal of using customer data to drive your business, you’ll flounder. You’ll de-prioritize the data project in favor of more immediate business issues. You’ll create a repository of customer data but will never take the time to analyze how new approaches can impact the business, let alone execute those initiatives.
At best, your team leaders will conduct siloed customer data projects that never reach the broader organization or manifest in customer benefits.
3) They anticipate customer needs.Whether this comes in the form of product recommendations or personalized discounts, these companies know how to surface opportunities to delight their customers. Because they know the “why” behind customer behavior, they know how to focus on what matters to these customers. They use their insights to tailor who they engage, how often they engage, what communications channels they use and what they communicate once they gain their customers’ attention.
Customers are more likely to try new things than ever before, which gives businesses much more freedom to experiment and try to orchestrate impactful engagements for their customers. However, this hyper-adoption is a double-edged sword because customers are also more likely to hyper-abandon experiences—and brands— at the drop of a hat. Understanding the “why,”making better decisions as a result of this customer data and actually delivering benefits to your customers by anticipating their needs is the formula for building customer relationships.
In my next article we will talk about some of the technologies that can help you execute these initiatives—AI, customer relationship platforms and others. But by first establishing a customer-obsessed culture, you will create the foundation needed to use these tools in a meaningful way.