Customer-Centricity: Turn Your Customers into Value Contributors September 17, 2021 Customer-Centricity: Turn Your Customers into Value Contributors September 17, 2021 It’s no secret, the health crisis has led to new emerging and accelerated customer journeys, particularly digital ones. So, how can you incorporate these new customers into a customer-driven strategy and turn them into value...
Customer-Centricity: Turn Your Customers into Value Contributors
September 17, 2021
Customer-Centricity: Turn Your Customers into Value Contributors
September 17, 2021
It’s no secret, the health crisis has led to new emerging and accelerated customer journeys, particularly digital ones. So, how can you incorporate these new customers into a customer-driven strategy and turn them into value contributors?
A new study recently published by McKinsey&Company shows that customer reviews can drive sales and growth. Let’s take a look at the challenges of customer-centricity today and this study’s key learnings, to see how you can apply them to your customer-centric experience strategy.
The Challenges of Customer-Centricity
When consumers were no longer able to go into shops during the pandemic, they turned to digital channels. The brands that were ahead of the curve in terms of digital transformation fared the best, as did those that were agile and quick to adapt.
Within this context, new 100% digital customer journeys emerged, as did hybrid journeys, such as Click & Collect or online appointment-making.
Customer-centric companies have all the keys in hand to ensure that these journeys are seamless, to continuously optimise them with customer feedback and identify any problems.
There’s no doubt about it – customer-centricity is a key challenge for companies today. During the various lockdowns, customers were more open to trying new services and products, to test new ways of consuming and therefore new experiences.Customer satisfaction standards are higher. Customers don’t just compare a company to its competitors anymore, but to all other businesses. If they have an optimised experience with a brand, they expect a similar experience from others.
This is true of both BtoB and BtoC! Professional clients are customers too and they expect to receive the same quality of service as they would in their personal life. Expectations of high standards already existed before the pandemic, but the health crisis has accelerated this trend, with a strong emphasis on digital transformation.
As we mentioned earlier, lots of new customer journeys emerged during the health crisis. Today, to offer customers an experience that makes you stand out from the rest, you have to make the customer’s life as easy as possible.
- How can you detect and eliminate irritants on the customer journey?
- How can you optimise your processes for a seamless experience?
- How can you offer omnichannel experiences, with the same level of quality on all channels, during the entire customer journey?
For the most part, brands are already aware of irritants. However, a customer-centric approach helps prioritise these irritants and choose which ones to focus on to create maximum value for the customer.
Wowing your customers with a service or product is great, but the best way to improve their overall experience is often to make their lives easier.
Finally, building a customer-centric culture within a company is one of the biggest challenges faced by CX leaders around the world today:
- How can you deploy the Voice of the Customer throughout your company
- How can you convey a customer-centric culture to employees?
- How can you place the customer at the heart of employees’ daily tasks?
- How can you put the customer’s interests first?
Creating Value Through Customer Reviews
We’ve now reviewed the various issues and challenges surrounding the customer experience and customer-centricity today. It is also important to note that customer brand loyalty has fallen over the past 15 years. The health crisis has certainly accelerated this trend, as customers are more inclined to try new products and services.In this context, the product itself has become a key marketing tool for brands, mainly due to the impact of online reviews on sales.
Now, let’s take a look at the McKinsey&Company study, which mentions the need to use customer reviews to create better products, and proves that there is a direct link between better ratings and better sales.
This study provides a 6-point methodology for optimising online review management. How can you incorporate these 6 steps into your customer-driven strategy to create value for customers? Let’s take a look.
1. Re-allocate resources to improve products and work closely with suppliers
The idea is to re-allocate some of your marketing budget to product improvement, for better online reviews. By improving your product so that it is as close as possible to customer expectations, you will create value for the customer and the brand.
2. Rethink your product benefits and improve the customer experience
Is the product description clear enough? Are the assembly instructions well written? By eliminating all the irritants around a product, you’re more likely to get better product reviews.
3. Manage your product’s digital presence
To optimise your products and services’ online presence, encourage your customers to provide feedback, whether via surveys or spontaneously on Google. Posting and answering all customer reviews, both negative and positive, also builds customer trust and is reassuring.
4. Use technology to analyse reviews
The Skeepers platform provides automatic and semi-automatic analysis of all customer feedback, with a platform that can centralise feedback from all your channels (online reviews, Google reviews, surveys, production data, etc.). In just a few clicks, you can identify all your strengths, weaknesses and product irritants, no matter the number of reviews collected and whatever the language.
5. Adopt new working methods
Deploying the Voice of the Customer throughout your company helps break silos. Giving synthesised feedback with the right information to the right person will provide your operational staff with everything they need to act and continuously optimise your products and services.
6. Apply knowledge to the entire organisation
Creating a genuine strategy around your Voice of the Customer platform gets all your employees involved in customer satisfaction, by spreading best practices and a customer-centric culture… These are the very foundations of customer-centricity, to improve customer feedback and create value for your customers.
Customer Feedback and ROI
The notion of improving products through customer reviews leads to the question of the ROI of a customer-centric strategy.
Lots of product reviews enable customers to form a clear opinion and help reduce returns… This is key in e-commerce because returns are very costly for brands. A product that better meets customer expectations will have the same effect.
Let’s circle back to the study we mentioned above. Among the many learnings, it is particularly important to stress that on average, every tenth of a point gained on a product’s average score, generates almost +20% growth.In terms of ROI, it is clear that improving customer reviews is a winning strategy in the current context!
For example, one brand noticed through the Skeepers platform semantic analysis, that customers were complaining about the length of the skirts in their collection.
By simply adding a few centimetres, this very same skirt became one of the brand’s bestsellers!
These examples prove that collecting and analysing customer reviews creates value by and for customers. By turning customers into value contributors, brands can create value for their customers, who benefit from higher quality products that meet their expectations, while the brand benefits from improved sales and ROI.
Discover the McKinsey&Company study, that deployed a Voice of the Customer strategy in more than 1,000 shops in France.
Conclusion
The solutions offered by Skeepers help build customer-centricity and create value by and for your customers, by enabling you to post reviews, optimise your presence and conversion rates, and collect and analyse customer feedback to generate insights and action plans for all your employees.
Feel free to get in touch to discuss your customer feedback and customer experience projects with one of our experts!