Long-term strategy

Customer-centricity is about relationship building. It’s a strategy that pays off most over the long-term and isn’t best suited to the kind of reactive marketing which hits the panic button whenever sales are flat. Even when your main goal is acquiring new customers or increasing customer value, the moves you are making should be with the full customer life cycle in mind. An offer that’s superficially attractive to new customers but will antagonise them later. A good example of this would be a gym membership which is often easy to sign up for, but very difficult to cancel.

The difficulty in thinking long-term is that it often means making smaller sacrifices today for a bigger return tomorrow. Offering a customer a cheaper tariff may lose you money today, but in demonstrating your commitment to providing the best service for that customer, you convert them into an advocate for your brand, prevent them from switching in the future and get more profit from them in the long term.

What about agility?

Throughout the pandemic we heard endlessly that brands needed to be ‘agile’ and ‘pivot’ to new opportunities. It is a universal truth that most businesses are focused on today’s picture rather than five or ten years down the line. Whilst customer-centricity should be seen as a long-term and ongoing goal, it can help still enable you to act quickly. With more knowledge around your customers, their journey and lifecycle, it’s much easier to make quick decisions and act quickly as you can anticipate the bigger picture and longer-term impact. Setting up the processes and capturing the right insight allows to react quicker to the ever-changing flux of the world.

Think outside

Sometimes its difficult to see the issues right in front of you. It’s very easy for today’s problems to get in the way of a more strategic and long-term vision.  This is why sometimes it can be useful to get an outsider’s point of view. Whether this is in helping you find and utilise the right insight, in change management and ensuring that your change sticks, or just in project management. Getting outside help is not without its pitfalls but sometimes by having an objective point-of-view can speed up the whole process.