What does customer centricity mean for you in the B2B sector? Is it a buzz phrase or a company ethos? Many organisations are fixated with customer acquisition, but the loss of existing customers can have major impacts beyond immediate sales – the upsell and future value of those customers is also lost and, when a company is listed, the share price adversely affected. 1.45m Cable and Wireless customers and 200k Netflix customers in the 1st Quarter of this year are recent examples of major customer losses.
Having a customer centric ethos can mean the difference between business success and failure.
We all know a few of the often quoted stats, but some of the Bain Consultancy’s metrics (2021) underline the importance of customer retention:
· Boosting customer retention by 5% increases profits by 25-95%.
· Companies have a 60-70% chance of selling to an existing customer versus a 5-20% chance of selling to a new customer.
· It costs six to seven times more to acquire new customers than to retain existing ones.
· 72% of customers switch to a competitor after one bad experience with a brand.
· Businesses lose over $75 billion each year to lost customers due to poor customer service.
· Industry leaders in NPS (Net Promoter Score) deliver almost 3x higher total shareholder return, compared to the stock market average.
Rather than assigning customer centricity as a tactic to ‘CRM’, ‘customer support’ or ‘customer service’, treating it as core to business and customer strategy can more powerfully realise its benefits.
Having the aspiration
Customer centricity starts by asking what sort of customer experiences (CX) and relationships your customers want. A people first and outside/in approach if you like. How should your corporate aspirations relate to those experiences? You probably have a customer satisfaction survey – but what elements of customer experience are priorities?
Fire NBM’s approach works across customer journeys with the customers’ problems at its heart – exploring what customers are not just doing, but thinking, feeling and experiencing. Valuable opportunities and notable barriers emerge along the way.
If the customer really is to be at the centre of an organisation, then the structure and culture need to reflect this.
CX is service, marketing and experience rolled into one
Customer personas, roadmaps of connected experiences and personalised journeys may lay the foundations of customer centricity but aren’t enough on their own. Moving from the status quo to ‘what might be’ brings home the cross-organisational nature of customer centricity so that it’s embedded in the attitudes and behaviours of leadership (for example with a Customer Experience Director) and throughout the organisation. Touchpoints may involve multiple departments from sales and marketing through to service and support. For smaller organisations, it’s still important to ensure there’s consistency of behaviours and, for example, minimum product and service standards.
Whilst the rewards of memorable CX for your customers are significant, careful planning is necessary for delivery. Before BT Business revamped its customer experiences for the 21st Century, it scrupulously logged, quantified and costed its customer interactions and channels by segment and lifetime value. It then reshaped and reimagined different contact methods and experiences by customer segment and persona, utilising Fire NBM’s customer contact treatment tables, followed by testing pre-rollout.
Once a foundation is established, customer centricity can become a theme of ongoing operations. It’s not stationary on a roadmap but evolves as customer insight grows and the customer and competitive landscape changes.
Digital & tech is key, but not the whole answer
Customer centricity has functional and emotional benefits for CX. Digital opportunities for richer content, faster web pages, integrated digital education, better product videos and so on are today expected more as a given rather than a differentiator. Digital brings many functional benefits, but the emotional ones from human interaction can often be missing as a hybrid CX. How often have we clicked on a chatbot pining for a real person to engage with? What should be the right mix of digital and human interaction?
For product or service satisfaction and after-sales to be at the heart of the customer experience, there’ll never be a substitute for human interaction at some points of the journey (at least until AI service robots have been perfected!). Furthermore, whilst it is clearly digitally driven, at its core, B2B customer centricity needs to be a deeply human endeavour. Accenture’s research-based report, ‘Service is the new Sales’, asserts ‘B2B buyers want and need to interact with smart sales people to help navigate organizational challenges or complex purchases and ensure quality service at every stage of the journey‘.
If it’s of value, track it
Wherever customers are solving their problems, data is key to unlocking customer centric issues and opportunities. Mapping the journey – understanding priorities from the customer’s viewpoint and what’s critical for them - is the start point. This enables data collection when and where it really matters on the Roadmap:
Fire NBM can help address customer centricity by helping clients with Customer Journey Mapping from an internal perspective and a customer perspective, dependent on what is most needed. Alternatively, we can assist with designing CX transformation programmes using Competencies and Capabilities Audits through to tracking and analytics, such as Net Promoter Scores (NPS) and Customer Satisfaction Surveys. These can show what your customers want, the problems they're trying to solve and the things they value.
Customer centricity benefits growth when embraced as a genuine aspiration and ethos, rather than a buzz phrase. It’s very human and goes beyond digital. It takes on many shapes and forms depending on B2B sector, organisational type, mindset and ambition. Do get in touch via the form below if you’d like to chat about improving CX and its associated business value.
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