The research service of the ACTITO relationship marketing suite (part of the partners of Badsender) recently published a very interesting barometer on "Customer Centricity". On this occasion, I had the chance to speak with Eric Godefroid and to exchange on the challenges and the evolutions in this subject.
Jonathan Loriaux: Let's get straight to the point, on the first page of your study, you say "Customer Centricity is not a feature you can buy". What is it then? Hasn't the customer always been at the center of companies' concerns?
Eric Godefroid : It's true that everything that is customer centricity normally explains the very existence of a company. Because a company could not live, in a capitalist sense, without customers. That said, today, the exercise of customer centricity is not the same as it was five or ten years ago. With the need for a new marketing approach to reach what we can call the new hyper-connected, hyper-dialoguing consumer, it is imperative that a company be able to have a personalized dialogue with its customers. So the question is: are companies still managing to be customer centric?
For some companies, being customer centric means following millions of consumers who are no longer in segments, but in individual behaviors. If technology, which is a necessary condition for success, is indispensable, we should not believe that by buying technology, the company will become customer centric overnight. The human factor, the organization, the skills and the marketing value chain must be profoundly rethought in order to market according to customer behavior and no longer according to the company's agenda.
JL: For a company that has fallen behind, what would be the very first step they need to focus on to put the customer back at the center of their strategy?
EG : From a technology point of view, marketing automation is indispensable. But, as we saw in the obstacles of the survey, it is the organization that must first adapt. One of the biggest challenges is the transversality of customer management and the good collaboration between marketing, CRM, IT and even general management since it is a strategic priority for the company. The second element is competence. For most companies, given the advanced skills required in data management, it is very difficult to do everything in-house. Therefore, it is necessary to go through an outsourcing exercise. Respondents said they would outsource a third of their marketing operations.
I think that unlike building management systems or ERPs that have very stable processes, most of the learning in marketing, whether it's mass, segmented or personalized marketing, is done under the exercise of customer and consumer activation. So you have to make sure that the technology and the processes are progressive. What we recommend is to do personalized marketing pilots in which we test these strategic assumptions, measure ROI, compare channel performance.
Then, with this return on investment, we can make a financial plan to consider the next stages of industrialization and automation. It's a step-by-step construction, which allows the technology to follow the company's maturity and, above all, which allows the human element, the teams, to collaborate on increasingly complex subjects. The opposite model to that, which people seem to be abandoning, is to say that we're going to do a 360-degree setup with all the data and all the processes. I think that today, this strategy is a utopia given the complexity of the subject and especially given the fact that companies can no longer take economic risks. So we are in the strategy of small progressive steps.
JL: To return to the subject of theoutsourcing campaign management and lack of knowledge, what makes outsourcing part of these processes an almost unavoidable step? Why can't training and ramping up existing in-house forces produce the same effect? What is the real obstacle to keeping most knowledge in-house?
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EG I would say that there are two elements. There is the skills side and the organization side which are two major obstacles to go further in customer centricity. In terms of skills, I think you have to be a huge company to have all the advanced skills of data mining, personalized marketing, customer relationship management, and customer journey management in-house. You have to marry the best of both worlds. That is, having a company that knows its business and its sector very well, but also having external partners who are capable of reading the situation across sectors and companies. In a way, we need to help companies overcome their historical silos, between marketing, CRM, IT and general management.
I think that's often what we do when we inject consultants or external skills such as marketing automation and CRM partners. The objective is to go beyond the classic models of company organization. When you add internal and external skills, you not only have a more competent company, but above all a more agile one, which can go beyond the organizational models of the company in the strict sense.
JL: Do all companies feel the need to move in this direction or are there still some that don't see what being customer centric means?
EG Some statistics on the subject, 83 % of companies say that customer centricity was a strategic priority for them. This is even more true for B2C companies, which feel even more the need to have a response to the hyper-connected and hyper-dialogue consumer.
The B2B world is less focused on customer centricity, because, at least at the marketing level, they still have the ability to use their traditional sales force to do customer listening without having to manage millions of data.
A B2C company no longer has the choice of not being customer centric. What we saw in our study is that companies give themselves three years to reach the right level. 15 % of companies have already reached the right level of customer centricity, not because they are in the right sector, but because they have decided to forge a competitive advantage. We can see that companies want customer centricity, of course, to keep their current customers, because it is easier to keep a customer than to win a new one, but above all to get incremental revenues. We can therefore say that customer centricity has truly become a business model rather than a culture or a marketing position. It is therefore a very capitalist vision, and companies are moving towards it. The speed depends on the company's willingness to forge a competitive advantage before the others.
JL: Are companies really able to assess where they are at?
EG There's a disconnect between perception and reality. Companies think they're halfway there, and when you do objective measurements of technology, data, and content, they're more like a third of the way there. Right now, they've done the easy third, which is injecting data to do more segmented marketing. That's just optimization.
On the other hand, we cannot say that for companies, data is the decision driver and the marketing driver. Companies are facing the hardest 2/3, which are linked to a DNA transformation, an organization redesign and a marketing value chain redesign. And so, that's what's deeply linked to digital transformation. Digital transformation is the means and customer centricity the goal.
People are lost in the means and in the resolution of problems. But we must not lose the final objective, which, in any case in marketing terms, is this ability that a company must have to speak the language of the customer, and to react in an individualized way.
