We’ve all read about the New Normal that was ushered in when the economy hit the skids last year: as consumers tightened their belts and we all slowed spending, a ripple moved outward which affected business spending and investments across nearly every industry. Wallet share decreased.
Operational costs for businesses increased. The credit crunch hit hard. The ripple effect of this new normal manifests itself in many other ways beyond spending, evident in the way consumers perceive and interact with the businesses that service them. Consumers have begun to scrutinize the companies they work with more closely. Once expected of consumer gadgets only, consumers have come to expect lightning-fast product cycles and fresh feature sets across any company or industry. This evolution has led to a new Darwinian customer: one that brand hops readily, is a hyper-discriminating shopper, relies heavily on self-service and often has less personal interaction with companies. What does this mean for today’s companies that are trying to be customer-centric and provide a customer experience that is optimized for both the consumer and the business?
- Organizations need the ability to get insight into a customer’s changing behavior and need to be able to act on that insight in real-time.
- Organizations need the ability to understand the impact that every customer interaction and conversation has on a customer’s lifetime value (CLV), and need to be able to simulate how new and revised product offerings could impact this CLV prior to the product offers being implemented.
- Social computing has shown that customers want to interact in the same way a face-to-face conversation would take place – implying dynamic, appropriate and specific responses to their requests. Gone are the days that organizations can respond based on a static set of procedures or processes.
- Organizations need to be able to implement solutions that present actions reflecting what the customer thinks about the company, rather than predetermined processes based on what the company thinks about the customer.
I’ll follow up with future posts that provide step by step best practices that explain how best to implement the recommendations listed above.
— Ray Gerber, SVP and CTO
