Despite marketing’s common wisdom, the customer is not always right. With that in mind, let us examine what customer centric SHOULD really mean.
They Are Not Always Right: What Customer Centric SHOULD Really Mean
According to Ken Roberts, Executive Chairman of Forethought, writing for GreenBook:
Saying you are dedicated to customer centricity sounds admirable. Right up to the moment that you realize just how insatiable customers are. In the absence of a rationing mechanism for customer experience (CX) investment, running faster with more initiatives will needlessly raise costs. While raising customer expectations. The higher customer expectations often flow into category expectations. And that means an overabundance of CX initiatives needlessly raise costs with little compensating return. In addition, you most likely raised the costs for competitors too. In this context, we use the term CX “initiative” to refer to a stream of work expected to eradicate customers’ pain points. Thereby raising the organization’s level of customer-centricity.
No organization should pursue the position of being entirely customer-centric. The diminishing return means that at some point, the marginal benefit of being customer-centric becomes less than marginal cost. At that point, the value of seeking further customer-centricity diminishes. Based on what Forethought encounters, most large organizations have expansive CX programs. They become too broad to bring about meaningful change in growth trajectory.
The challenge? Determining which customers and what requests of theirs that firms should fulfill. While also deciding which customers and what requests of theirs that firms should not fulfill. Even today, marketers remain hard-pressed to distinguish between the two scenarios. Instead, they fall back on the customer always being right.
Therefore, to learn more from Roberts, click the image.
