Marketplace approach to Customer Centricity
Customer Centricity is the cornerstone of an organization’s strategy formulation and decision making process. It’s the guiding compass that shapes organization culture in doing the best for their customers.
To become customer centric , organizations have employed numerous strategies like omni- channels, insights driven recommendations, hyper personalization, targeted campaigns, better user experience, real time offers, cross-selling, up-selling, customer first and first time right initiatives. Many firms have improved their loyalty and rewards program and offered product bundles at discounted pricing.
Companies anticipated that the above strategies would create a loyal base of customers with a bigger wallet share of products and services and that eventually, these customers would act as brand ambassadors in promoting the firm to friends, families.
A few organizations were successful with this approach as they gave their customers renewed attention to their queries and complaints with better pricing and services.
However many others companies simply remained in delusion as they misunderstood customer tolerance for customer affinity. This is because their customers have had no better alternatives and the cost of switching to competitors product was simply not worth the time, efforts & the lengthy documentation required.
Nevertheless, irrespective of the success level, these firms were more an “organization centric” than “customer centric”. They channeled their organization’s efforts to provide best possible products & services within the boundaries of their industry expertise without much regard to the customer-journey in daily activities. These firms fenced their customer’s data as if they owned it thereby creating information monopoly and also barriers for their clients in availing better products and services from competing firms.
With internet penetration, proliferation of mobile devices and increased comfort level in using digital channels , these organization-centric models were increasingly challenged by boutique firms (fintech, insuretech, regtech, pharmatec to name a few) who were able to provide niche services fulfilling specific customer needs in a much more efficient, transparent and user friendly manner.
So to remain competitive, firms should follow a marketplace approach to customer centricity offering encompassing services from diverse sets of industries required by targeted customer-segment to do their daily activities. Firms can own, participate or collaborate in the marketplace thereby diversifying their revenue channels, increasing cross-sell opportunities, deepening customer relationship and creating a win-win situation for their enterprise and their customers.