IMD-OWPLIVE22-PostEvent-Report

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ACTION POINTS

Make sure you understand that customer-centricity is not only about marketing slogans such as ‘developing offers that customers desire’; this may well only be the starting point. Customer-centricity should also be present in how firms deliver and capture customer value. Tightly couple your customer- centric marketing strategy with digital technology and key leadership behaviors.

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Be pragmatic: customer-centricity is a journey. Solve your first customer- centric challenge and build momentum from there.

not use digital technology, which brings creativity, connectivity and commitment. And nothing can really happen if one does not start to question key leadership behaviors. Empathy, humility, and courage need to become part of the firm’s DNA in order for the company to make significant progress along the journey to becoming customer-centric.

Nor can firms target their customer-centricity efforts at the level of frontline employees. This is because the root cause of customer issues are usually processes. If you want to maintain, or regain, true customer-centricity at the organizational level, you must do more than empower employees to be nice and courteous in every customer interaction; customer- centricity has to be an integral part of every dimension of the business model: value systemic deficiencies within organizational

conception (desirability), value delivery (feasibility) and value capture (profitability). Customer-centricity is a strategic ‘North star’, and it’s systemic. So, unless you permeate its components in all the dimensions of your business model, it will most likely remain wishful thinking. This, in turn, requires that you integrate digital technology and leadership capabilities into your customer-centric marketing strategy. This is because a firm cannot be truly customer-centric if it does

TRANSLATE PRINCIPLES INTOCONCRETE ACTION Many firms target their customer-centricity efforts at the wrong level in the organization and end up with a piecemeal approach. It often starts at the top. Senior leaders, invariably with good intentions, promote customer- centricity as a motivational slogan (such as “customers are at the center of everything we do”). But these principles rarely translate into concrete action plans that can improve a firm’s performance.