CUSTOMER CENTRICITY
Maximize ROI from Customer Centricity in BtoB companies
Bruno Taborin and Jörg Ohleyer, Partners
Moving towards more Customer Centricity… now a must ?
Several trends at work are pushing B2B players to reinvent their model around customers and clients, making the status quo an almost impossible option to maintain:
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Imperative: strategic intimacy with the customer allows the anticipation of strategic disruptions (new priorities, strategic shifts, new customer needs).
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Evolution: from value chain to ecosystem, with changing contours and a less linear logic (appearance or disappearance of intermediaries, development of aggregators, disappearance of sectoral boundaries, etc.).
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Convergence: BtoB and BtoC expectations now have a lot in common, with codes that raise the bar in terms of experience and customer journey (the BtoB customer, as an individual, refers to his BtoC experiences).
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Revolution: new sources of customer value, with a tendency towards the servicization of business models to complete or transform the value proposition through services and technology to develop a unique yet enriched relationship.
… however, and despite multiple paths, the results of customer-centric approaches remain disparate.
Customer intelligence, customer obsession, CRM, customer centricity, NPS, voice of the customer... for 40 years, many tools and concepts have blossomed with the same goal - to better capture customer value - with varying ROI. If the concept of customer centricity has allowed companies to focus on the need to transform the entire organization around the customer (and no longer just marketing or sales), there are hurdles that make the application more or less complex in BtoB:
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A tendency for BtoB companies to consider only direct customers and not their entire ecosystem
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A customer segmentation initially focused on the offer, with difficulties in integrating customer "uses"
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A lack of visibility into customer centricity, with a relatively siloed application, often limited to marketing or operations
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An ROI that is generally limited to the boundaries of the company and takes little or no account of the customer (few indicators to measure the value delivered to the customer).
Succeed in your customer-centric transformation in the B to B universe
While there is no silver bullet, we believe that 4 ingredients are key to a successful customer-centric transformation.
1. Opt for a 360° approach, designed and driven at the executive level
Customer centricity touches every part of the business:
Building a customer centricity program requires thinking about the organization as a system, including all activities that contribute to creating differentiating and sustainable value for customers (beyond the customer relationship).
2. Align teams on a starting point… from which to deduce a customer centricity target model
Each company has its own maturity, strategic context, and areas of challenge that need to be integrated and aligned in the customer-centric transformation. The key is for the management committee to agree on a starting point before defining the destination. To guide our clients through this phase, we have developed a diagnostic tool - the Customer Centricity Index - which provides an initial overview of their company's maturity level in 20 questions, to be compared with our BtoB benchmark, which provides valuable benchmarks for action.
3. Linking customer centricity and strategy to ensure overall strategic robustness
Validating the consistency of the customer centricity ambition with the current maturity of the company and the strategic ambition makes it possible to ensure that efforts and resources are aligned at all levels. The target model is thus a strategic filter that makes it possible to prioritize the company's strategic axes, redirect them and identify new ones
4. Thinking customer centricity as a transformation program to prepare for action
To achieve a 360° approach to customer centricity, the ambition must be translated into a transformation plan that involves all teams. It must be thought out in advance to break down the priorities into rhythmic actions over time, supported by tools that enable teams to act rather than being the result of a plethora of initiatives.
Being customer-centric means reaching an advanced level of customer focus that goes beyond simple "focus" to create a transformation of the organization around the customer. Structured around customer value in all its dimensions, the customer-centric company ensures that the value created within the company is not lost or diluted before it is delivered to the customer.
