What the heck is Customer Centricity?

Reading the very interesting post Customer Centricity is MORE than Customer Experience by Joseph Michelli I engaged into a discussion about things centricity. The discussion basically is about answering the question “What the heck is customer centricity?” – this elusive thing.

And how does it relate to purchaser enjoy and different ?Centricities?, like fee centricity, product centricity, or provider centricity?

When will we call a organization purchaser centric?

Of course there are a few traditional suspects that may be used as examples to make one component or another.

Is Ryanair client centric? Aldi? Amazon? Apple? Google? Starbucks? Jiro?S sushi eating place?

Luckily all taking part disputants have a exquisite view, so there may be a shiny dialogue happening, from which you may study a LOT.

But first things first. Let’s get the issue of customer centricity vs. customer experience out of the way. Joseph states, that “customer centricity is a commitment or a strategy to assure the success of your customer. Whereas, customer experience is a set of customer perceptions forged across all their interactions with your brand.” (emphasis by Joseph Michelli). In brief: customer centricity is a strategy and customer experience is an outcome.

This distinction is crucial, as not handiest a customer centric method leads to consumer reviews (plural, every interplay along with your brand outcomes in an revel in), which acquire to client experience (singular, the weighted sum total of all patron stories over the years).

So, permit?S expect there are four possible natural techniques: patron centric, fee centric, product centric, provider centric, and located a stake into the ground by way of the usage of in short defining them.

I name a method service centric if all selections that a employer takes revolve round presenting great possible company within the market.

It is product centric if all choices revolve round having the pleasant feasible product inside the marketplace.

A charge centric approach attempts to set up the fantastic viable (typically lowest) rate inside the market. For the sake of the dialogue right here I cope with a price centric method as similar to a device centric approach, as lowest rate comes most effective with optimally streamlined techniques.

Finally, a purchaser centric strategy is one that establishes the nice viable final effects for the client.

Of path all and any of those strategies are to be visible in a agency context, most significantly within the need of staying worthwhile.

And generally they flip up in a aggregate. There not often are pureplay strategies, with the feasible exception of the fee approach. Ryanair, or Aldi can function examples. I am certain there are more.

Where the primary three are very extraordinary from the final one is that they've an interior-out interest even as the client centric technique has an out of doors-in attention. It first appears on the customers and their needs and then evolves its product, fee, even the business corporation around first-rate success of these dreams, or imparting best fee to the purchaser ? Again, in the limits of staying worthwhile.

But, they all bring about client studies and consequently to consumer revel in. Just that they'll be very remarkable.

Experiences have some relation to expectancies. If you anticipate a no-frills enjoy and accumulate precisely that, you're more at risk of be satisfied. If you anticipate something gold-plated and obtain copper, you aren't. If you expect some thing gold-plated you are also much more likely to go to similarly lengths to gather it. These lengths can also truly emerge as part of the (advantageous) revel in, as they propose exclusivity.

This is, where the simplified Maslov pyramid of expectations comes into play that I described in earlier posts, e.g. here.

Price natural-performs might be able to satisfy the base expectancies; there can be no frill, no actual ease for the consumer and truely no wow.

Product and service strategies, particularly the latter, have the capacity of including ease to the mixture. The value for the purchaser will growth, and so does the enjoy (if performed proper). Customer centric strategies then moreover offer the possibility of a wow ? The possibility, no longer the promise.

In order to attain this, customer centricity needs to encompass factors of all of the special strategies. All elements of the purchaser existence cycle need to be looked at out of the purchaser?S eyes and the employer desires to be built spherical what the consumer sees. Or else it will in all likelihood be no longer possible to place the client at the middle.

I?D argue that only patron centric techniques bring about in reality unswerving clients. The other techniques in captive ones.

Am I proper? What do you believe you studied?