Customer Centricity
Customer Centricity. These two ubiquitous words won’t leave me alone.
They popped up while I was flipping through annual reports. Again, while I was driving past billboards. And again and again, while watching TV interviews of CEOs on CNBC.
In fact, if these two words could grow legs I would swear that I was being stalked by them! And yet, they are just inert words. Sadly, I haven’t really experienced these words in action anywhere until quite recently, which I will talk about later in the article.
Actually, the opposite of customer centricity has happened to me more often than I care to count. Allow me to trademark a word that describes what I have encountered most accurately: call it ‘customer periphericity’. Definition: putting and pushing customers to the remote edges - hoping they’d go away and create havoc elsewhere, preferably at the competitor’s premises.
I was in that zone of ‘periphericity’ just a few months ago. I tried to get someone at fashion retailer Tod’s US office to stand behind their expensive but defective designer bag I’d bought.
After weeks of contact with their customer service representative, Armin, he confessed that though the bag was definitely defective he was not empowered to help! Pushing away the responsibility to own up to its brand promise essentially made Tod’s brand equity, in my eyes, worth less than the bag I bought!
But, really, why is there so much hype about customer centricity anyway? Simple. There has been a recent research that has conclusively demonstrated that companies investing in customer-centric initiatives enjoy higher financial returns - as much as a 30% ROI levels greater than their peers who lack such centricity, according to a 2007 Gartner report. So, it pays to be customer centric!
But any simpleton could have told us that. Providing an experience that makes the customer feel like she’s important would surely make her want to stay with your business/product/service; return to buy more; tell others about it; stick with you through thick and thin. Isn’t that what any business wants?
However, very few companies get this right. So what’s so difficult?
