Customer Centricity 3.0
If we now think about where leading companies are today, and this concept of Customer-centricity 3.0, we see further maturing in mindset and capability.
We start to see full activation of strategic experience design. Where in 2.0 there is some fantastic design work and power point presentations flying around, they don’t impact the experience delivered on a day-to-day as much as they could or should. In 3.0, this full activation means that organisations are really starting to think about what they are trying to deliver, the memory they are trying to create, and the emotion they are trying to anchor it to. Organisations are spending increased time with customers, employees, design and tech teams to determine how to deliberately create these memories and how to anchor them with the relevant emotions. There is a recognition that the margins are in the memories.
Mindset shift has become incredibly important. This is not all about practices, policies, and business stage gates, it’s really about the way organisations, through every employee, make decisions. It is arguable that the way an organisation delivers its experience is nothing more than the sum of all the decisions that all the leaders and employees in that organisation make. When you think about it in those terms, suddenly the mindset and psychology and the way organisations make those decisions is very important.
There is full operating model alignment. If you think about a corporate goal like “we want to achieve x, deliver on our purpose, or hit a certain target in terms of market share or revenue growth or profitability”, the way we do that is by delivering experiences and propositions that are compelling and drive advocacy and repeat usage.
A lot of operating model revision and redesign and work over the last fifty years has been about cost reduction, process improvement and risk mitigation.
What is happening now in this area of Customer-centricity 3.0 is organisations are recognising that delivering an outstanding proposition and experience consistently is what is going to create the most value. Therefore, they need to align their operating model and structure to execute consistently exceptional experiences. It is a very different way of thinking, but it creates a lot of value.
Continuous insight feeds, rapid adaptation of strategy and propositions and intentional experience creation are more common.
Organisations are taking customer listening strategies to a new level.
These organisations constantly collect insights about customer motivations and decision making, receiving feedback and information right across each journey stage. Strategy can then be ongoingly tweaked based on these insights and organisations can rapidly respond to operational issues.
