I’ll give you an example from an industry that has not woken up to customer-centricity – insurance. I recently changed my car insurer (an annual event, obviously, unless you are lazy enough to acquiesce to the auto-renewal) and my new insurer, RAC, sent me an SMS which read: “Thanks for choosing RAC for your car insurance. We wanted to send you some important telephone numbers to store in your phone should you ever need us. We’re here for you on these lines 24/7.”

The message included numbers for claims, windscreen repair and breakdown. None of my previous insurers had managed to carry this off. The message pleasantly surprised me. And then my surprise surprised me. But why?

Could it be that for some insurers, the cost of sending such an SMS is deemed to outweigh the benefit to the business? How do you go about measuring the benefit of these text messages – net promoter score? Perhaps the reduction in the number of calls that come in to the wrong number? Both of these are potentially difficult to measure accurately.

This is a sticking point – customer-centricity can’t always be mapped to the bottom line, especially not in the short term. It is no coincidence that companies recently associated with customer-centricity are often startups in the process of scaling up and perhaps not worried about short-term profitability, nor constrained by legacy structures and technology.

Ultimately, work on the customer experience is work to build your brand.

Customer-centricity is both an art and a science. User research is required, leaders need to champion the customer, and organisational structure needs to ensure product-centric teams do not result in a disjointed customer journey.

What else can get in the way? Judging from a roundtable I moderated at Econsultancy Live, there are issues with siloed data (coveted by the department that keeps it), siloed objectives (strategy needs to be set from above), and investment in marketing teams that is often too executional and channel-led (i.e. there’s no way to take some people away from business-as-usual to work on something new).

There’s another factor getting in the way of great customer experience. Mike Jeffs, client service director at the agency Edit told me: “Brands need to pay much closer attention to what customers want and anticipate their needs, an art that has been somewhat lost in the world of acquisition-focused marketing.”

Acquisition ties so neatly to the bottom line. Want to invest in some new behavioural retargeting capability? Your boss might respond by asking: ‘How much extra money will it make us every month?’ But is enough consideration given to the long-term impact on brand of sending daily emails badgering prospective customers? Or of whether the user experience of your website or app is a bigger problem higher up the funnel?

Sourced through Scoop.it from: www.marketingweek.com