On Becoming Customer Centric

Some say “customer centricity” has become a corporate buzzword, often spoken but not acted upon. That can’t be true anymore because today, corporations are told straight in their faces if they piss a customer and buyers off, right in front of a sizeable audience via a consumer liberation tool called social media. The public now speaks up not only when pissed, but when they think you can do better – not being generous enough, fast enough, accessible enough, cool enough, delightful enough, sincere enough, and so on…

This goes beyond customer service or the product, but the full spectrum of experiences that an individual has with your brand. It doesn’t matter if they are paying customers or not. So it came to be that the safe concrete walls of corporations doing their own thing came crashing down.

For businesses, there are
two ways they take this
new consumer power,
either: gladly or fearfully.

Those who embrace the customer’s voice gladly feel they had been given nothing short of a gift.

In the movie, “What Women Want”, Mel Gibson’s character was given the ability to read women’s minds after a freak accident. As he knew exactly what a woman wants, he can make any woman feel especially understood and respond in the most ‘on point’ way. That ability got him the deals, the women, and repaired a distant relationship with his daughter.

Wow! Today, with the constant chatter on social media, we can know exactly what consumers want, in real time to boot.

We have the power to do everything right
to encourage consumers to buy,
stay loyal and advocate the brand.

Yet, many businesses have outright rejected the gift of the consumer’s voice, make up the majority: they fail to respond or worse, give failed responses that make for entertaining news. Depending on the size of the business, unleashing social media hate can even fold a business overnight.

While reengineering our business for our new end-to-end service experience, we tuned in to what consumers want by customer experience mapping, focus groups, social media listening, read consumer research reports, and listened to consultants go through stats. We did the whole nine yards to get into consumers’ minds to craft out that better, and more enjoyable experience by being the most in tune with their wants.

We found out Malaysian consumers
wanted less than they deserved
(I will address this in another post),
anticipating their future wants
by looking outside of
our country and the industry.

As a new mobile entrant, it’s a waste of time to be just on par or a little better. It’s a bit like why Cambodia is said to have better Internet speeds than Malaysia. As a late adopter of ICT, they start with current new and improved technology and practices to leapfrog their progress. New P1 is on a mission to leapfrog end-to-end customer experience.

Putting customers first have become
the only way to do business for us.

While it starts with knowing, I will be the first to admit that we have some way to go to become a customer centric organisation. It’s a lot more work than putting out a relevant product or training customer service people to service with a smile. It’s integrating new tools and technology, total organisation systems & processes improvement, and throwing out the old and embracing a new customer centric culture.

Becoming customer centric for real takes time and is proving to be a huge and challenging synchronisation effort, but we had started and are committed to follow through. Once your eyes are open to the undeniable power of the new consumer, it draws you in and you just have to submit to it.