Customer experience is everything, difficult to copy and replicate. It takes you away from the pack and cannot be commoditized.
Power has moved to the hands of the consumers. Organizations focusing on traditional
means of selling and marketing their products are falling short and shooting themselves in the foot.
Organisations need to start branding their customer touch points. What makes your customer touch
points exceptional?
The importance of the customer centric approach is evident in Amazon. With a 50% share of the US e-commerce market, which is more than triple the combined shares of its main competitors, Amazon is one of the most successful companies in the world. A large part of Amazon’s success can be attributed to Bezos’s obsession with delivering a superlative customer experience.
According to Bezos “there are many ways to center a business. You can be competitor focused, you can be product focused, you can be technology focused, you can be business model focused, and there are more. But in my view, obsessive customer focus is by far the most protective of Day 1 vitality”.
At Elevato and Associates, when discussing the need for reviewing customer
experience, the above requirement to create a customer first culture is daunting to most Executives.
This is because, they know that changing their organisations and making it customer experience focused would be very painful in the short term because it will require process changes across the organisation,
and change is one of the most difficult to achieve.
But, it is clear that customer experience has never been more important to businesses for the following reasons:
• Organisations that do not have a culture of focusing on customers and their changing needs may be
left behind. “Only those that develop a customer centric culture will remain relevant.”
• Customer experience is what will show differentiation in this era of commoditisation. Service and
product organisations are all almost doing the same thing, where the only differentiating factor will be
how you make your customers feel.
• According to David Strom, customer experience will help organisations reduce at-risk revenue by
recovering potentially lost customers, engage existing customers as a sustainable engine for growth,
reduce the cost of new customer acquisition, engage employees – reduce staff turnover and cost of
hiring as well as reduce the cost of customer and employee feedback infrastructure.
To stand out from the pack and competition, organisations need to start challenging and boldly
reviewing customer touch points from the gate to the Boardroom and everywhere in between.
To ensure that they either remain at the top or ascend to the top tier headship in their industry.
Leadership needs to constantly ask the question “how do we make our customers feel and what changes”?
can we make, if not positive”? Answers to this question, must then be rigorously implemented for continued relevance, because the Customer is King.
