Why Being Customer Centric Is Vital
Online, March 17, 2011 (Newswire.com) - Lots of businesses profess to be customer centric, but are they really?
Being customer centric means much more than just surveying your customers to see what they think. What it actually means is putting your customer at the centre of everything your business does, in order to deliver products and services that fix their most important problems, and satisfy their biggest wants and needs.
In his Building a Business in the 'Thank You Economy' article below, world famous social media guru Gary Vaynerchuk explains why he believes building a business around old-school ethics and skills, is the only way to succeed in this internet-enabled word-of-mouth economy.
In his Inside Best Buy's Customer-Centric Strategy article below, Harvard Business School professor Ranjay Gulati explains how Best Buy survived and prospered, in the cut-throat world of consumer electronics by becoming truly customer centric.
Building a Business in the 'Thank You Economy':
Social media requires that business leaders start thinking like small-town shop owners. This means taking the long view and avoiding short-term benchmarks to gauge progress. It means allowing the personality, heart and soul of the people who run all levels of the business to show. And doing their utmost to shape word of mouth by treating each customer as though he or she were the most important customer in the world.
In short, business leaders are going to have to relearn the ethics and skills our great-grandparents' generation used in building their own businesses and took for granted.
We're living in what I like to call the Thank You Economy, because only the companies that can figure out how to mind their manners in a very old-fashioned way -- and do it authentically -- are going to have a prayer of competing.
Note that I used the word "authentically." I care a great deal about the bottom line, but I care about my customers even more. That's always been my competitive advantage.
We often call people who do a consistently great job "a professional," or "a real pro." I try to be a pro at all times, and I demand that everyone I hire or work with try to be one, too. All my employees have to have that caring in their DNA. My store, Wine Library, outsells big national chains. How do you think we do it?
It started with hustle. I always say that our success wasn't due to my hundreds of online videos about wine that went viral, but to the hours I spent talking to people online afterward, making connections and building relationships.
I could have talked to a million people a day about wine, but if I or my employees had come off as phonies or schmoozers, my company would not be what it is today.
You cannot underestimate people's ability to spot a soulless, bureaucratic tactic a million miles away. It's a big reason why so many companies that have dipped a toe in social media waters have failed miserably.
Visit the link below to read Gary's full article:
http://www.managementnuggets.com/2011/03/why-being-customer-centric-is-vital.html
Inside Best Buy's Customer-Centric Strategy:
What are the challenges of doing business in today's marketplace? A sampling of senior executives would probably come up with the same list: Competition is global. Companies are increasingly competing for the same wallet. With more choices and information, customers are choosing mostly on price. Even before the recent downturn, what former IBM boss Lou Gerstner called "commodity hell" was pretty much every business's nightmare.
That sampling is also likely to agree on the solutions: Embrace your market and become "customer-centric." That said, it would be hard to find a CEO who would tell you that his or her firm isn't customer-centric already. And that's exactly where mass delusion begins for most companies.
To be sure, most major enterprises do have departments devoted to surveying their customers. But the truth behind "garbage in, garbage out" still applies. Ask about your business only through the lens of your offerings - How do you like product X? How can we improve service Y? How receptive would you be to new product Z - and you may learn something about them, but you will discover almost nothing significant about your customers.
Becoming customer-centric means looking at an enterprise from the outside-in rather than the inside-out - that is, through the lens of the customer rather than the producer. It's about understanding what problems customers face in their lives and then providing mutually advantageous solutions.
Visit the link below to read Ranjay's full article:
http://www.managementnuggets.com/2011/03/why-being-customer-centric-is-vital.html