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The last decade saw no shortage of businesses that both succeeded and failed to capitalise on changing customer needs. Those that succeeded, such as Netflix, AirBnB and Uber, now dominate their markets while once-huge brands like Blockbuster and Kodak find themselves consigned to the history books.
Not responding to changing customer needs puts your organisation in jeopardy. Competitive prices or a good quality product aren’t enough to stand out anymore.
PwC’s annual Global CEO survey is a sobering read: 40% of CEOs think their organisation will not be economically viable in 10 years’ time. And, over half of them say changing customer needs and preferences is the biggest threat to profitability.
Survival rests on embedding customer understanding into all aspects of decision-making, which often means transforming how your business is structured and governed.
At STRAT7 Advisory, we make the process easier, helping you become more customer-centric and profitable. Keep reading to discover how.
1 / The missing pieces: what is true customer centricity?
Businesses invest significant time and money in understanding their customers – whether that’s through strategic research projects like segmentations or more tactical pieces to validate hypotheses.
Yet, few achieve the impact they desire. Data science capabilities fail to put information at decision makers’ fingertips while segmentations only have a limited impact – typically only used by the marketing or innovation teams but unable to influence the whole business.
So, what does it take to become truly customer-centric?
We believe true customer centricity is an organisation’s ability to capture, understand and act on changing customer needs:
- At scale: in a connected way across the whole business and its processes
- At pace: with high frequency and short lead times
But being able to continuously anticipate what your customers want and react accordingly is challenging. You need to understand how to:
- improve your customer-centric capability
- uncover growth opportunities from a customer-centric perspective
- translate your strategies into actionable plans that drive success
And that’s where STRAT7 Advisory becomes an invaluable resource.
2 / Our winning approach to customer centricity
We identify the capabilities you need to build, helping you approach customer centricity in an integrated way. We also guide your growth, covering your brand, acquisition and innovation strategy to be customer-centric. And, most importantly, we advise you on how to act on the strategy through effective planning tools that empower and inspire your teams.
We’ve helped some of the world’s leading organisations become truly customer-centric. With the right insight and expertise, they finally break through the barriers that have prevented progress. And we can do the same for you.
Here are some examples of how we’ve supported clients, covering the three core areas of our approach.
Capability
Building customer-centric capability
You might have a great understanding of customer centricity but are you bringing it to bear on the right business decisions?
A leading furniture retailer was losing market share despite using a lot of customer insight. Customer centricity wasn’t being approached in a systematic way, which meant insights were not available at the place, time and in the format needed for decision-making.
They commissioned us to undertake a global segmentation project that would improve their understanding of their customers. However, during the segmentation process it became clear that the business’ internal processes needed reviewing before they could extract maximum value from the segmentation.
So we rebuilt the operating model of its insight function, developing its understanding of how the company should be organised. Looking at what capabilities it needed from its people and the best way to tie everything into its strategy and planning.
We made our client’s capability truly customer-centric, ensuring the right insights were at the fingertips of anyone who needed to make impactful decisions.
Strategy
Finding your next source of growth
Once you have the ability to maximise the value of your customer understanding, the next step is putting the right strategy in place. A lot of businesses stumble here by making their strategy too commercially-driven, generating plans that don’t effectively respond to customers’ needs.
Our client, a leading consumer health company, was facing a stagnant innovation pipeline across multiple categories. One of the main causes of the stagnation was that the client’s growth strategy wasn’t helping them identify and act on opportunities.
All previous approaches to growth strategies were driven by the commercial or R&D team. Instead, it needed to be grounded in consumers’ needs and preferences while also attending to the commercial realities of the business.
Our approach involved thoroughly interrogating the client’s different data assets and a programme that sought input from all functions in the organisation. We identified a series of opportunity spaces that were anchored in consumer insight while also recognising the commercial realities of a highly regulated industry.
This helped build out the client’s innovation strategy with a clear vision and mission, along with strategic imperatives to prioritise. The process has now been adopted across all categories in the business and is the go-to tool for approaching innovation and growth strategies.
Planning
Translating strategy into actionable plans
Your strategy won’t deliver if it isn’t translated into something tangible. Like an innovation strategy that generates new product ideas or a brand plan that translates into a communications brief. You need actionable plans that keep the customer at the heart of all decision-making.
When we began working with a global insurer, they already had a strong strategy in place to become more relationship-centric instead of product-centric. They wanted to use hybrid segmentation to be more in tune with their customers’ needs and priorities, but they also needed to make sure the insight was usable in the context of making the right business decisions.
After creating and running the segmentation, we worked with the insurer to activate the customer insight by facilitating a cross-functional approach through a series of prioritisation workshops.
Key stakeholders discovered how to prioritise the segments and translate the strategy into actionable steps. The workshops generated confidence in customer-centric decision-making across the business. And because insight-led plans are fuelling commercial success, it’s encouraging more markets to use segmentation as a tool for customer centricity.
We can help you translate your strategy into actionable plans that lead to tangible change.
3 / Capitalise on the opportunities change presents
Customer-centric companies are 60% more profitable than their financially-driven counterparts, according to research by Deloitte. Enduring success lies in making the customer experience your point of difference.
Streamline your approach to customer centricity with support from STRAT7 Advisory. Our deep business understanding, coupled with a world-class toolbox of insight expertise, drives progress.
And it’s a seamless experience as we provide a single source of truth — bringing the best people and resources into one solution. We tailor our advice and input based on your business’ unique structure and challenges, ensuring you get the personalised support needed to embrace change and reap the rewards.
