Customer Centricity in the New World
The current pandemic is impacting and pushing organizations to rethink their operations. As businesses find ways to manage their internal operations and their people, there is a need to ensure that the customer is being kept at the centre of all actions.
As behaviours change, society at large re-evaluates the way we live, shop, and consume – new buyer personas will emerge and continue to have a large impact on businesses (in this case, our customer). Almost all businesses would have gone back to the drawing board to recraft their business models and strategies.
So what does customer success mean in this new normal? How can you use this as an inflection point to make a positive impact on your customers and their outcomes?
Here is my view.
Customer success would mean understanding your customers, their changing needs, changing outcome requirements, and consistently providing value. Keeping customer-centricity as your true north, pre-emptively setting up a way forward discussion with your customers, being a consultant who provides insights, inputs, and solutions based on customer profile and market analysis.
What then does one need to do, how can organizations become true partners with their customers in the current circumstances? Some key call outs to make this a reality:
Drown out the noise and focus on customer success: Customer success is the responsibility of the entire organization and not just of the customer-facing functions. The entire organization has to be customer-centric, committed, and collaborate to ensure that each of them is contributing to delivering strong customer outcomes and value.
Understand your customer’s changing needs and create relevant customer success plans: What is your customer’s new business reality, what has changed for their customers? Using the SWOT analysis approach create plans that are contextualized and customized to your customers. Start with an outside-in perspective, begin with focusing on your customer’s opportunities rather than the traditional approach.
Enhance and humanize customer relationships: Customer relationship which is a key aspect of customer management has always been based on meeting and engaging with the customer consistently. It is obvious that this has to continue but what has to change is the way you engage, leverage technologies along with keeping the human aspect of your connection alive. Find ways to keep the connections going, really listen, be flexible to navigate the current complex situation to ensure that you are still engaging effectively.
The call to action then is to focus on evolving customer management framework and keeping the customer and their success at the centre of all that is being done, and socialize the mantra that ‘our success depends on our customer’s success’.
Would be interested in hearing your views and opinions on customer success.
Author: Subbalakshmi Kasiviswanathan