How to Thrive In a World of Disruption: Transform Your Business by Becoming Customer Centric

It is the interaction between people and brand through technology that defines what is being called digital transformation. And there is a lot more to it than just launching a new website, building an app, or wrangling some big data. Digital transformation represents the understanding that all brand interaction has now become inherently digital, interactive, and dynamic.

Let’s look at that in the real world. When someone calls customer service, the entire exchange is managed, enabled, and tracked via call center and database digital technology. When anyone watches a TV ad, it is targeted, produced, distributed, and evaluated digitally. And even in-store, the clerk that helps the customer attentively is probably checking things on his or her smartphone or tablet, which is digitally connected to the entire supply chain system around the globe. Everything is inherently digital and moves at the speed of light. 

So, it flows naturally, or at least it should, that in an age of regular disruption, there is also a constant need for transformation. And in this era, that transformation must be digital if it is to succeed. Yet, according to Boston Consulting Group, 75 percent of transformations fail. What’s the solution? It all comes down to delivering outstanding customer experiences, which pay off for both the customer and the brand, via what we call The Fair Exchange.

In a landmark study, published in the book, Outside In, Forrester Research found a high correlation between customer experience and stock valuation. Over a five-year period, customer experience leaders’ stocks outperformed laggards by 70%. And we’re talking about global 1000 companies across multiple industries and billions of dollars in play. Treating your customers right does pay. But how do you deliver great customer experiences and reap the benefits to the business? It comes down to three basic concepts: Business Transformation, Marketing Transformation, and Technology Transformation.

The real reason most digital transformations don’t produce engaging, impactful, and relevant customer experiences and fail to deliver the intended value has nothing to do with technology and little to do with marketing. It mostly has to do with the way the company runs. The first step is to create a culture, organization and processes that reflect customer centricity.

Everyone talks about being putting the customer first and promising to deliver great customer experiences. In the ultimate irony, Cable Company X, which consistently scores near the bottom of every index of customer experience, guarantees “consistently superior customer experience” on their website. In one of their more infamous incidents, a customer service rep refused to let a customer cancel their subscription. I’m sure the employee was not mean spirited. They were simply following the direction, which was to keep the customer at all costs. Which is a good goal from the company’s point of view. The trouble was the employee wasn’t looking at it from the customer’s point of view. They were being company-centric, not customer centric.

If they had tried to get at the customer’s root problem, they might have either been able to help or at least left a positive impression by satisfying the customer’s request. They still may have lost a single customer for the moment, but that probably would have been better for the company than the negative impact of the incident going viral.

How does an enterprise start down the road to becoming customer centric? It begins with understanding your audiences (customers, prospects, partners, competitors), who they are, what they want to do and how they want to engage with your company and brand. Practically speaking, a good place to start is to a conduct customer journey mapping exercise. Figure out exactly where and how people (not just your existing customers) interact with you. Then figure out which touchpoints are working, from their point of view. And finally take a look at each touchpoint and assess their relative value to the company. After that, it’s not difficult to prioritize what needs to be worked on.

The roadmap probably will include technology, but most likely it starts with process and organizational readiness. And the solution will certainly include healthy doses of change management and business process re-engineering. It may sound complex, but the outcome is worth it.