Frankly, Forget Customer Centricity

I’m getting tired of ‘Customer Centricity’. Since markete(e)rs have panicked over the empowered consumer, Customer Centricity is ‘it’. One of the basic ways to start being customer centric, is interacting with your customer. We’re all transforming into conversationalists and storytellers, or at least we should be. However, the thing is that any good conversation starts over a cup of coffee or tea. Meaning that you create a ‘moment’, you make and take time for it and you focus on each other. But when is the last time you did that as a markete(e)r before engaging the conversation with your customer? Right. Because now we’re telling stories everything will be OK?

Last week I received a message from my fellow-author Steven Van Belleghem (The Conversation Manager) asking how companies can start a conversation if they know so little about their customers. A question I also asked through Twitter some time ago. Yep, the conversation sure is a great thing, but we forget to create our coffee-break with our customers. Sorry, no time, no can do?!


8(0)-delivery-gap

Research has shown and confirmed recently (Bain & company) that 80% percent of companies (400 researched worldwide) are convinced that they deliver a superior customer experience. But only 8% of the customers agree with that. Meaning that 92% of the customers are passive loyalists; they stick to your offer because they just got used to it. Because they don’t ask questions (anymore). because they know or presume that elsewhere they’ll get the same (non-)experience. Nothing to worry, unless you’re in a market where the customer feels he gets a pretty lousy deal. And then brands like Virgin pick in. Or O2. Or Zappos. Because Zappos ‘lives’ its customer. And the company lives it values. How many companies that you know have ‘fun and weird’ as one of their major values? How many companies do you know where the financial department keeps an internal parade EVERY FRIDAY, celebrating one of their fellow colleagues?


WHY, tell me WHY!

What seems to be the problem? Why can’t we deliver customer experience? What makes it so hard? Because it is an intangible asset. Because it is difficult and complex to measure.

But consumers don’t ‘measure’ or analyze customer experience. They just live it. No discussion, no argumentation, no thick report to explain and understand. According to Bain’s report most companies don’t grasp it. Do they think that they can still decide for the customer what is a good experience and what is not? They probably still think it isn’t up to the customer himself to decide.


Forget the customer?

Certainly not unless you are suicidal and want to forget your business. But customer centricity just seems to be too high. We, market(e)rs, just can’t grasp it. We can’t work with it. And yes, we try. We try really hard. So what now?

Very simple: make it tangible. Make customer centricity tangible for the market(e)r. Don’t tell stories. We have to create a book of fairy tales or a book full of adventures. With images and heroes. And market(e)rs will start telling stories. But they need that book. Because books and iPads are tangible, stories not. Give markete(e)rs a cozy corner with a coffee machine and some choices of sweet tea. And they’ll sit down, take time and enjoy the moment. Then they’ll engage in a conversation. They’ll even start listening. And chatting. And telling things you never knew but always wanted to know.


So, what is that book in marketish?

You could call it product-service. A service that is created around a product. An example: think about your car. What makes your relationship with that brand? Whatever brand it is. “The product” would be the first answer. But since decades there are no bad cars anymore. They’re all great and drive just fine. And they’re all customer-centric in more or less the same way. As well as they’re not customer-centric in the same way. The customer focus doesn’t come from the product. It comes from the services that are created around it. The product-services. Those services that are created around a product in order to support it.

Successful product-services are very tangible AND they are customer-centric by definition. They support your products and brands, create loyalty if they’re well designed and can be all-present. If they’re not customer centric, they won’t be used. This means that you can instantly track and measure your customer focus. Product-services are customer focus made tangible.

So, forget customer centricity and customer focus. You won’t make it through that path. Embrace those services that support your product. It doesn’t matter whether they are online or offline, digital or IRL.

What matters is that they bridge your 8(0)-delivery-gap.