Increasing Relevance of Customer Centricity in Today’s Business
Prof. Ritwik Dutta, Lecturer, IQ City United World School of Business, Kolkata
Customer-centric, also known as client-centric business strategy is based on providing foremost priority to the customer by considering them at the core of any business to develop a positive customer experience and long-lasting sustainable customer relationship. Placing the customer or client at the core of the business organization and integrating it with Customer Relationship Management (CRM), it is possible for the businesses to collect substantial data on customer behaviour and preferences. This customer data is useful to enhance and improve customer experience. It also enables the businesses or organizations to anticipate the respective customer needs and preferences and fulfil them accordingly by providing the right products and services. For example, Apple Inc’s entire business strategy is intensively based on customer-centricity. Their products are customized in a such a way that generates customer attraction leading to increased sales and revenue acquisition. Furthermore, the Apple Centres provide world-class customer support to help them get set up and out the doors with a smile on their face.
Hence, a customer-centric approach generates products, processes, policies and a culture that are aimed to enhance and improve customer experience right from initial product or service selection to the point of subsequent purchase or sale.
The following points highlight some of the major customer-centric business strategies that the companies can possibly employ: –
- Employee Recruitment for customer success: Employees are absolutely indispensable for establishing a proactive workforce in order to ensure a positive and customer experience. Irrespective of job roles and designations, it is important for businesses to focus on hiring talent in accordance with customer-centric thinking as well as the significance of customer experience in any business.
- Prioritizing customer relationship: Customer acquisition is not only important for revenue performance report. Additionally, customers benefit greatly from mutually conducive and sustainable relationship
- Organizing customer data: A centralized customer database can immensely facilitate the adoption of a new customer-centric strategy that enables a centralized access to all the customer data and insights. In this regard, installation of any new CRM databasecan provide a much better and comprehensive understanding of customer needs and expectations thereby establishing an organized and composite customer repository that can deliver better customer experiences.