Making your company customer centric isn’t a bad thing, unless it generates too much choice and paralyzes your clients when they try to make informed choices.
Saturation over satisfaction
As the concept of customer centricity grew, companies began to focus on providing everything – essentially giving customers a stack of options from which to choose. Our customers’ expectations increased at the speed of choice, and we ended up offering saturation over satisfaction.
The problem is that the more choices we have, the less we choose. For example, a service company may have a list of 12 services – a comprehensive list of everything the company offers. However, their projects combine four of those services for Industry A and a different set of six for Industry B.
What is a customer to do? Should customers choose the combination for their industry, or should they choose each of the individual services separately? If they choose not to include a critical service in their project, what impact will it have on success?
Too much choice leads to confusion and inaction.
Unambiguous and easy to follow
In place of choice, we need to guide clients to the right solutions. The can-do mentality has been proven; today, we need a “be clear” policy, especially in the many sectors that offer a broad scale of services or products. Our product and service definitions, and our storytelling in content marketing, need to be unambiguous and easy to follow, which will make them even more compelling.
Use new disciplines
New disciplines are emerging to help us in this quest. Data targeting is giving us the ability to use customer data to define small groups of like-minded people and identify their needs.
However, raw data only provides information – the real power is in interpreting that data to provide meaningful insights. Data storytelling uses data, visual images and narration. Done well, you’ll have a story that can drive change.
Hire critical Hawkeyes
A fresh set of eyes looking at your portfolio and content strategy will start the process by identifying areas for improvement. Then, you need to kick-start the real learning by killing your darlings. Are you ready to create your own transparency? Will you create products, services and content with limited choice?
Let’s start by making ‘customer centric’ a smarter term, learning to limit choice for clarity’s sake.