The Elusive Customer-centric Operation

Organizations have been trying to achieve a Single Customer View and provide customer-centric sales and services for a long time. How do you know when your organization is "customer-centric"? What exactly does it mean?

Defining "Customer-centric"

It is hard to universally define what it is to be customer-centric, primarily because of the difficulty inherent in the word "customer." Customer means different things to different organizations: the retail operations of a bank may consider the individual account holder as its customer; a property and casualty insurance company may consider both the insured and claimants as its customers; a life insurance company may consider the agent who sells the company's insurance as its customer; a health care company may consider the doctor and pharmacist as its customers, a manufacturing company may consider both buyer and supplier as its customers; a government agency may consider all citizens as its customers. For simplicity, instead of citing examples using many different industries, the retail banking and insurance industries will be used throughout this book as the predominant examples, since much of the population have bank accounts and insurance policies, thus making them easy to relate to. Hopefully, after reading this book you will gain a new understanding of Master Data Management (MDM) and be able to relate it back to your own industry and situation.

A good way to define a customer-centric operation is to view it from the customer's perspective — what they want to buy and how they wish to be served — not from the organization's perspective — how the organization wants to sell and service its customers. A distinction must be made about whether a customer is new (i.e., has no current or previous relationship with the organization) or already exists. For the sake of this definition, we will look at the customer-centric definition from an existing customer's perspective. New customers will offer the organization some slack when not being served in a customer-centric way, since the assumption is that the organization doesn't know who they are. Of course, the new customer still expects the organization to provide service with pleasantry and respect. However, once customer data is captured from the first instance of a business transaction, the customer's expectations will be higher. No excuses exist for the organization not to be customer-centric when providing further sales and services to this customer. A customer can be a person (e.g., for a retail bank) or even another organization (e.g., a customer of a corporate bank or supplier of a manufacturing company), but they all want the same things. They simply wish for the company to:

· Know who they are

· Know who they are related to (for a single customer, these relationships could be family household members, where they work, and related third parties that are of interest, such as their accountant, lawyer, etc. For an organization, relationships could include the organizational hierarchy, departments, employees, and related third parties that are of interest, such as any registered regulatory bodies, marketing associations, etc.)

· Know what products and/or services they own and/or subscribe to

· Know what products and/or services the rest of their family/business owns and/or subscribes to

· Know who they work for, in what capacity, and what their employers own

· Know their past interactions across all channels

· Know what new products are important to them

· Know when, where, and how to reach them (e.g., address, phone number, fax, e-mail, etc.) as well as when to use these channels and for what purpose

· Know their privacy preferences (whether they want to receive sales campaigns or not. If yes, for what products, through what channels and when) and protect their data against unwarranted access or usage

· Be up to date with information (e.g., when customers move or change phone numbers, they only want to have to notify the company once, not five times because they purchase five products)

· Provide consistent sales and service experiences across all channels

· Tell them about things that might be of interest without them having to ask

The list can go on and on, based on scenarios for different types of customers and lines of business (LOBs). But to keep things simple, we can summarize a customer-centric operation according to the following four "KEEP" categories:

· Knowledge (K):

* Who they are
* What products and/or services they have
* Their interactions across all channels
* How they want to be served and sold to across all channels

· Efficiency (E)

* Requests should only need to be made once
* Requests should be executed quickly and accurately

· Effectiveness (E)

* Know how profitable they are or are not and treat them appropriately
* Provide them consistent treatment across all channels

· Proactivity (P)

* Predict what they need and tell them before they need it
* Remind them of actions your company needs to do

The "Driving Test"

Let's use our regular banking experience as an example. I call this the "driving test" to see whether a bank is customer-centric in the way it interacts with me. Here's how the scenario works:

Let's start with my bank profile. I have a few accounts with my bank — a personal savings account, a personal checking account, a personal credit card with which I have joint ownership with my wife, and a brokerage account to manage my investments; I also have a company savings/checking account for the small business that I own and run from my home (called ABC Corporation), another credit card for my business, and a trust account for which my two daughters are the beneficiaries. I don't have much money in my personal savings and checking accounts as my money is invested and managed via the brokerage account and ABC Corporation.

My business has been reasonably successful, and I have just moved to a new and bigger home. In addition, I have installed a few new phone lines for my personal and business use.

I signed on to the bank Internet service and started to change my personal profile for my accounts. I managed to change my phone profile and then realized that I didn't have time to complete my address change, because I had to drive to an important customer meeting. So, I got into my car, put on my hands-free mobile phone device, called my bank's service number, and started to drive. Since I don't carry all my banking details with me, the number I...