3 C’s of Consumer Centricity

Back into a few age old discussions on customer centricity and wanted to remember the foundations that formed the basis of organizational changes I was fortunate to have been a part of. (originally published in September 2014)

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Consumer-centric organizations are known to do all they can to engage with their customers and proactively cater to their needs. Often these will include product/service updates, social communications, systems to support consumer-centric strategies, etc. 

However, it is easy to feel burdened with multi-directional pulls on your consumer-centric strategy as tactical urgencies evolve in any business cycle. Keeping a framework of key consumer touch points is imperative in such situations to stay focused and continue to deliver on the promise of better than excellent engagement. I categorize these core consumer touch points into 3 areas – the 3 C’s of Consumer Centricity.

1. Content – what does a consumer see about your brand, products, services? Are you developing content that clearly communicates and reinforces the value of your products and services? Does this content remind the consumer how valuable their relationship is to the brand and vice-versa? Whether a consumer is using your products or not, we need to evolve our content strategy such that it caters to consumer need for information, before and after they make a purchase decision, and at the time of purchase, you will typically get the nod.
2. Choice – Do we offer choice in our products and services? Is our product strategy in-tune with the evolving market dynamics, namely, technological changes, consumer usage behaviors, market expectations, etc.? After we have successfully attracted consumer attention, we need to ensure we are ready to live up to the promise – great product and service. As and when consumers mature and place their trust in your brand, you need to be able to offer a portfolio that goes beyond the core product(s) and allows the customer to strengthen the bond.
3. Community – Speaking of bonding with brand, what better way than to draw customers into your community. Do you have a community that not only caters to customer queries, but also, provides valuable information to enhance your products/services? Social revolution has brought about a radical shift in organizations’ communications tactics, as to how frequently and what do consumers need to know. We need to proactively build this into our marketing strategy and invest in right resources to maintain it and keep it current. 

As we all know, consumer life-cycle starts well before they become our customers, and continues well beyond their first purchase. The 3 C’s provide a marketer’s view into this life-cycle and by creating the planning tools within this framework may just help simplify analysis, refine your marketing/communications strategies, maximize ROIs and contribute to your maturing as a consumer-centric organization.

Managing Business by Revenue OR Customer Experience

In executive reviews across many organizations, discussions are often centered on online traffic, subscribers, revenue, cost, EBITDA, systems availability, key initiatives, etc. What I have found lacking is a detailed analysis of the drivers of these numbers – our customers and their interaction with the brand. Customer experience with our product or service determines performance and trending on the above metrics, yet it rarely is the starting point of a conversation.

Recently, I started one of my weekly reviews with sharing the data on what customers were saying about one of our key products. Included with this insight were comments and feedback gathered from our sales and customer service organizations. Obviously, we were discussing the problems that some of our customers were facing and just as quickly identifying fixes to alleviate those problems. I then proceeded to show our metrics trend, which merely corroborated the customer experience and, the forecast if we continued the trend. Just by switching the order in which we discuss the product or service, we accomplished more in terms of actionable outcomes, quite an achievement in itself. However, a more strategic benefit of this approach could be that we now start to build a more customer-centric organization, the benefits of which surely translate into favorable metrics trends that all executives prefer.

Give it a shot – turn things around to show metrics/reports from a customers’ perspective. I am hoping you’d notice a similar excitement about customer-centricity as I did in my trial.