I have always believed that words like Customer centricity, Customer experience,Customer obsession etc are all fluff unless there are changes in the company’s operating model. Unless customers are given a place in the boardroom, it isn’t likely that we as consumers would sense a difference, despite all the analytics & technology at play. There is this anecdotal story about Jeff Bezos at Amazon leaving a seat vacant at every important meeting & telling everyone to treat that vacant seat as the customer in the meeting.

Now, companies have petabytes of data & a plethora of technology choices with which they can analyze this big data & get big insights. But the rubber meets the road, when the customer gets a better experience because the “customer data ” enables it!

Today I addressed a webinar at the Super CX week organized by Oracle.

Customer experience is changing as a concept & is creating large opportunities for companies who truly believe in bringing the customer up front & centre. Remember, it is easy to talk about Customer obsession rather than embrace it.

India now has close to 450 million Internet users. In fact, we now have over 440 million Millennials & over 390 million Gen Z consumers(born after year 2000). These consumers think very differently & have very different expectations from brands & companies.

And these youth have a social megaphone that allows to wrest the bargaining power towards them!

• Marketing will move towards relevancy
  • “Marketing that is done so well that it feels like a service”-To service is to Sell
• “Marketing as a relationship”
  • Customers would only respond to “profitable conversations”
  • No one wants a relationship, unless it is relevant
• Mass customization: segmentation to increase dramatically
  • From 3-5 segments that most businesses maintain to lights-out, automatic modelling that is driven by the data
  • Segment of 1

Delighting customers doesn’t build loyalty; reducing their effort—the work they must do to get their problem solved—does. How do companies embark on such a journey.

A few points to consider:

1. Support an institutional memory of the customer-different silos or “lines of business” creating campaigns & running them independently means that you do not have a centralised contact history or “intelligence” about customer response
2. Enable dialogues not just campaigns. If campaigns are seen as just “list pulls”, then anyone who knows basis SQL should be able to do the job. But the consumer is no longer ready to listen to “push marketing” & the creation of a “dialogue factory” is one essential element of a strong Customer strategy
3. Establish a strong Customer management council: group of top leaders in the company who are able to mediate to solve the issues that arise out of taking customer centric action. This council becomes a strong enabler for Campaign management playing a differentiated role.
4. Being loyal to customers & not the other way around (customers needing to be loyal to the company). This needs companies to have a longer term view of customer lifetime value & not a short term view of immediate profit. It needs an internal senior level stakeholder who champions the customer cause (CMO?)

Two years back Gartner predicted that by 2017 CMO’s will spend more on IT than CIO’s. Is this happening? So how big is the market for marketing software today? IDC has an answer to that question, $20.2 billion in 2014. IDC expects that the market will have a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 12.4% for the next five years, resulting in a $32.4 billion market by 2018.

I would urge CMO’s & CEO’s to first articulate & get board level agreement on a differentiated Customer Strategy. Make Marketing technology & team structure investments after that.

Here is a copy of my presentation at the Super CX week organized by Oracle today. Hope you will evangelize some of these concepts at your company.

Customer Experience Oracle

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