Customer centricity is a key strategy that helps businesses better align themselves with their customers’ wants, needs, and behaviours. There are many organisations now who try to become customer-centric, but only a few of them actually succeed.
For organisations that attempt to implement customer-centric strategies, they have a number of obstacles they need to overcome. One of the bigger challenges to overcome is the level of understanding of the power that insights hold throughout the organisation, and because of this, the road to customer-centricity can never be fully realised until this is overcome.
One way to start to overcome this obstacle is to create and implement customer-centric market research. To integrate the objectives of customer centricity into market research strategies, insight experts need to better understand what customer-centricity is, the path to customer-centric success and what market research strategies already lend themselves to the values exhibited by customer centricity.
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| The path to customer-centric success can be a long journey to endure, but the results at the end are usually more than worth the effort and resources spent along the way. |
Customer Centricity and Better Research
The road to customer-centricity is long and winding, full of twists and turns as stakeholders trial different strategies to see if they bring them closer to customer-centric success.
To succeed in customer-centric market research, there are certain goals insight teams have to hit. The first is to use market research to closely connect stakeholders to their customer based; the second is to educate the rest of the organisation in such a way that they recognise the true value and power of insights and use these insights within each decision made; the third is to ensure that the rest of the organisation actively go to the insight team whenever new insights are needed.
There will be more goals depending on the specific objectives within each insight team, but these general goals will help build up the reputation of insights within the organisation and work to embed the voice of the customer in most if not all decisions made from the point of implementation.
But the insights that are generated with customer centricity at least in mind have the power to transform businesses from a product-centric to a customer-centric organisation. They can help stakeholders create brand and customer experience from shared values and goals to make it worthwhile for customers to engage with, resulting in more customers finding and staying with that business and even choosing them over others within the same industry. The insights can drive the research and development teams to build better products and services, tailoring them to the needs of customers and better predicting the future needs of the target audience.
The market research strategies that can help fuel this innovation and positive transformation are outlined in the infographic; the more common strategies tend to be easier to apply in the short-term, such as agile iterative testing. This is a method that has been taken up by many an insight team in the past few years, and lends itself to better product and service development alongside the customer feedback loop, with both strategies going back to the customer time and again after applying updated insights to the design.
Market research is crucial to elevating a business into the ranks of success through customer centricity, with certain strategies leading stakeholders to success more than others.
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| Market research is crucial to elevating a business into the ranks of success through customer centricity, with certain strategies leading stakeholders to success more than others. |
A two-speed research strategy hasn’t been talked about quite as much as the agile or customer feedback loop strategies, but holds a lot of potential for insight teams who are willing to give it a try. With two streams of research running at the same time - one stream reserved for ad-hoc or short-term projects that inform a specific decision or question asked, and the second stream allocated to long-term research such as customer community research – more insights are able to be generated in real-time and with a pinpoint accuracy that can inform even the most specific of questions.
Market research such as this is crucial to elevating a business into the ranks of success through customer centricity. But this journey is not without it’s perils. There are challenges specific to each organisation that need to be overcome, however there are glowing examples of businesses that have achieved this success well to guide the way.
So, the question now is: knowing the road to customer centricity is a long one but is a journey that pays off once achieved, what does your journey to customer-centric success look like?
