Customer Centricity: from Stance to Reality

In this new short piece, we set out why brands must learn to be increasingly agile and follow six simple and decisive principles:

1. The customer couldn’t care less about the channel: Instead, they expect coherence and continuity in their experience between the different channels.
2. The customer couldn’t care less about touchpoints and reasons of contact: The quality of the customer experience no longer revolves around a series of experience points, but rather an everyday, on-going intimacy.
3. The customer couldn’t care less about sectors: They don’t just compare rival brands, but every brand in between, going beyond business sectors.
4. Humans aren’t machines: Digital technology has strengthened the need for a human touch in the customer relationship.
5. Awareness of the abundance of personal data is creating a demand for relevance: Big data is not just a trendy term – every proposal and message put out by a brand must be perfectly customised.
6. Bland is boring: Consumers attach real value to anything offbeat or (positively) surprising in the customer experience.

The driving force behind a brand’s future growth thus lies in a synergy of channels, real-time use of an intimate knowledge of customers and a re-introduction of the human factor at the right time.