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With third-party data quickly disappearing from marketers’ radar and customer acquisition becoming increasingly expensive and challenging, experts are now rightfully focusing on data from their customer base to grow revenue. The first-party data deriving from those purchases is reliable, only available to their business, and past interactions with the band have already led to buying in the past. But how can companies cut through the noise and make sure their message is being heard? The answer is through a Customer-Centric Culture.
According to Gartner, this is “the ability of people in an organization to understand customers’ situations, perceptions, and expectations.” And using customer data surely pays off in creating a pleasant customer experience. In fact, over 63% of U.S. consumers would share more information with a brand that can offer a great experience.
Customer Centricity: What Does It Mean to Be Customer-Centric?
A customer-centric mindset puts the customer at the center of your business’s decision. The core of your company culture is finding out what your customer’s expectations are and catering to their needs. This is not a trend that will fade within the next few years – the strategic goal of a customer-centric company is to change company culture once and for all to serve customers in the best way possible.
But what does it take to achieve true customer-centricity? We’ve identified a few factors for you.
Customer Centricity: Centralized Customer Data
Insights are key for personalization, which is the base for customer-centricity. Only when you know your customers, you can shift your company culture to be customer-centric. Every interaction with a brand needs to be tracked and documented, be it a click on an ad, interaction with social media, or a phone call at customer service. Creating unified customer profiles allows you to consolidate this data, enabling you to activate customers based on reliable insights from all sources. Customer profiling relies on your real-time data. If you’re not already storing your data in a CDP for a sustainable long-term view of your customers, this is your call to start doing so.
Customer Centricity: Personalization – But Make It Automated
Gathering data and establishing a data-driven company culture is well and good, but you need to have a little context to come with it. Insights (and not pure data) are key to a customer-centric approach. Your tool landscape needs to help you interpret all data points, so you have the chance to activate it for customer-centric communication. In 2022, customers expect a truly personalized customer experience, which is not easy to implement. In a 2021 Forrester study, 53% said that they could not clearly identify customers on their website, making onsite customer-centricity virtually impossible.
With the right support through your MarTech stack, you have the opportunity to implement and establish personalization across platforms. It needs to be engraved in your marketing workflows, work on all channels, and all of that, preferably with a sprinkle of AI.
Customer Centricity: Omni-Channel Marketing to Reach Customers Where They Are
This year, companies cannot afford to be present on a limited number of channels. Part of their customer experience strategy needs to catch customers on as many touchpoints as possible. These can be:
review sites
social media platforms
physical stores
print ads
direct mailings
digital marketing channels
website
loyalty programs
paid social, SEO
and many more
With a customer-centric approach, you listen closely and respond on exactly those channels. The challenge is identifying each customer on each channel and funneling the interaction back into your data hub. Unified customer profiles then paint a holistic image of the customer journey.
Customer Centricity: Summary
A customer-centric culture must be internalized by each employee – not just those working on the customer-facing side. Teams need to align and look at the same database constantly. With every decision made, the question “how do our customers benefit from it?” needs to be the first one on the agenda. This strategy can only work when all data points are collected, unified, and stored in the same place. Data silos are the enemy of customer-centric company culture, so it’s crucial to have the right CDP platform to unify your data to draw customer-centric actions that can create a pleasant, consistent experience.
This article was first published by Mapp. Permission to use has been granted by the publisher.