Customer Centricity. The New Axis of High Performance | Accenture (@Accenture)

Complementary Information: The journey from products to customer-centricity. Digital Disruption. By Ammad Butt and Jostein Damminger, Accenture.

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The Customer-centric. Insurer in the Digital Era. What it takes to succeed in a connected, always-on world | Accenture (@Accenture)

«Focusing on the new consumer

»Today’s customers seem to think the world revolves around them—and they are right.

»The global economy has entered a new and complex phase, as the contours of the commercial landscape are reshaped by unprecedented levels of competition, eroding customer loyalty and the quickened pace of innovation. Together, these forces have triggered a seismic shift in the balance of power between providers and their customers.

»This is good news for organizations that see the opportunity amid the change and align themselves quickly and effectively around a new focal point: delivering a customer-centric experience—profitably and consistently— designed end-to-end around customer perspectives and intentions.

»Accenture’s High Performance Business research has shown, in fact, that designing the right customer experience and delivering it the right way leads to better financial performance, stronger brand value and improved customer loyalty.

»Make no mistake, however: achieving and sustaining customer centricity is a challenging proposition which grows more challenging every day. Around the world, consumer expectations are rising quickly, and their perceptions are defined through an increasingly complex set of interactions. Moreover, new consumer populations are emerging with distinct needs and preferences of their own.

»With so much changing, few organizations are fortunate enough to maintain a deep understanding of what customers want and a clear view of what they really experience—or the ability to keep experience aligned with expectation. An airline, for example, may claim success when it gets a customer to her destination on time at a competitive price, but if it loses the bag she needs for a critical meeting, it still stands to lose her business permanently.

»To weather the economic and cultural transformations now underway and achieve high performance, organizations must refocus the entire experience they provide around the desires and intentions of their target customers— from the first impressions created by marketing and sales to the day-to-day experience of using a product from its initial purchase until it is upgraded or replaced.

»They must also achieve this level of customer-centricity with the speed, flexibility and certainty demanded by their market. To make this change, they will need insight, leadership and commitment to excellence—a challenging journey, to be sure, but one that must be made.

»Why customers are the new focus

»For most enterprises, growth comes from developing new customer or market segments, bringing new products and services to market, or driving more value from current customer relationships. The challenge at the center of all these growth strategies is their volatile target: today’s customer—more elusive, more demanding and more diverse than ever.

»Even with providers working harder to win their favor, customers seem only to find more to dissatisfy them, from shoddy toys to stale vegetables, while finding little dissuade them from defecting to competitors. Buyers today tend to categorize providers into polar extremes—the “distinctive” and “everyone else.” Earning a place in the distinctive category has become far more difficult and costly.

»For one, consumers know more—and their knowledge is power. Detailed product information and the opinions of other buyers are easily available, courtesy of the networked world.

»Accelerating product life cycles pose another challenge. The rapid pace of innovation means competitive advantage is increasingly short-lived, forcing providers to improve the impact and velocity of innovation and increasing the damage they incur when a launch backfires or a product fails.

»Increasingly, enterprises must also consider a changing consumer base, often including entirely new buyer segments. The demographics of mature economies are evolving, and companies must respond to changing buyer needs and values. Also, emerging economies are becoming important consumer markets in their own right, expected to account for more than half of global consumption by 2025.

»These “new” consumers have distinct characteristics and may regard foreign brands with uncertainty or doubt. Understanding and appealing to buyers in these markets will require new insights and new approaches to marketing, sales and customer service.

»Another factor helping to tip the balance of power away from companies is their own success. While learning to satisfy latent customer demand—for speed, efficiency, convenience—organizations also taught their customers to expect more from all providers. Consider how overnight delivery became the new normal in the courier business, or how the ubiquity of online banking has compelled other providers to offer around-the-clock service channels. Hotels with check-in lobby kiosks, for example, help late arrivals reach their rooms faster. They also lead guests to expect all hotels to offer the same experience.

»Customers have even come to expect every provider to meet the service standards set by other industries. Few consumers use multiple cell phones from multiple wireless companies, for example—but they do interact with airlines, banks and a host of other providers, and how they are treated by these organizations in these industries influences how they expect to be treated by their wireless phone company—and their grocer, cable company, government institutions and so forth.»