KEY DIFFERENCE BETWEEN CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE AND CUSTOMER CENTRICITY
Customer Experience and Customer Centricity are often being treated as synonyms, but they are not. Also, more than semantic confusion people are confused as to what part is most important.
The concepts of course both relate to the importance of the Customer. Yet If Customer Experience involves the what that customers get, Customer Centricity is the why that motivates companies to provide the experience. As a result, both are important, and both are totally interdependent.
Customer Experience is the more pragmatic concept to explain and often the first focus of companies on a journey to become more customer focused.
WHAT IS CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE?
Simply put Customer Experience is creating value through transforming Customer Journey’s. Many businesses already understand that it’s no longer enough to compete on products or services. How an organization delivers value to customers is beginning to be as important as what it delivers.
Building Customer Journey’s is at the heart of mapping out how a company interacts with its customers. Journey’s are best defined as a visual representation of the steps and emotional states a specific customer goes through over a period of time to accomplish a specific goal that may include some interaction with your organization.
Companies starting with doing their first Customer Journey workshops will find it exhilarating to get such a new perspective of how to better interact with their customers and they will be able to accomplish a lot of quick wins.
However, they will also realize that to build these new customer-facing processes it requires a whole new mindset and a new way of collaborative working throughout the whole organization. This is where Customer Centricity comes in.
WHAT IS CUSTOMER CENTRICITY?
At its core Customer Centricity is a culture, a mindset, and a set of competencies that informs the behaviour of the entire organization. It involves every individual at every level of the organization operating under the assumption that everything they do has the potential to affect the overall experience of the customer.
The responsibility for customer centricity is often associated with the marketing department: “creating value by focussing on the customer needs and how they want to interact with your business - not your products, it’s features, or revenue model. And that of course remains true.
But Customer centricity goes far beyond just marketing. It goes to your motive throughout every single employee for wanting to deliver good customer experiences in the first place. The more customer-centric your organization is across the enterprise, the more likely your customer experience will be “with a common intent” thus becoming more meaningful for your customer.
MINDS&MORE APPROACH
Customer Centricity informs a real Change Management program that requires you to focus on the right Mindset and Competencies to have in place. We find that the change program often does not require the launch of totally new projects but rather that the list of existing programs cross all departments just need to be slightly re-scoped behind a comon customer intent : i.e. checking if the programs are sufficiently designed around the customer (example checking for customer first reflex when recruiting new employees).
Minds&More has helped many companies struggling to understand how on one hand to short term start building customer experience yet maximizing its impact longer term by making their organisation more customer centric.
Our approach is inspired by the Customer Experience Professional Association which groups the worlds largest group of CX professionals in the world to exchange best practices every day (cxpa.org)
Do not hesitate to contact us to talk about your challenges around Customer Centricity.
