Designing and executing a customer-centric business model requires end to end organisational alignment. Customer-centric capability development cannot take place in isolation to the rest of the business. The customer-centric journey requires a clear quantified understanding of current organisational capability across all 14 capability areas of the SCHEMA® Customer Management framework in the centre of the REAP Customer-Centric Blueprint below. As important as an understanding of current customer management capability is, so too is an understanding of the capability to which the organisation aspires.
Each week I’ll address another single capability area, sharing with you the Transformation Intent to which your organisation should commit to, as well as ‘What Good Looks Like’ for those organisations that have achieved a fairly high level of maturity in the respective capability area.
The REAP Customer-Centric Organisation Blueprint®
This week we are dealing with Insight & Planning which is one of the six Enabling capability areas represented. The Enablers explore the components needed to energise your transformation and will invariably involve changes that can be planned for within the current business cycle, for implementation in the next budgetary or operating period. These components support your capability to implement your chosen customer strategies and rely on the fundamental building blocks (Foundations) already discussed in Part 1 to 4 of this series of blog posts.
Transformation Intent – Insight and Planning
“Whereas data management ensures that the quality and priority of critical customer information enables a customer-centric approach, insight and planning translates that data into meaningful patterns of customer drivers and behaviour. With this understanding you can transform your approach to defining your customers’ needs from an outside-in perspective, thereby segmenting them correctly and, thus becoming capable of delivering a relevant and superior customer experience, while being mindful of your competitors’ manoeuvres.”
What Good Looks Like – Data Management
- The current and changing nature of customer transactional behaviour is understood in its own right and in terms of how it relates to other behaviours. Non-transactional behaviours (both on-line and off-line) are captured and analysed as well as being researched at the market level.
- The nature and relative importance of own-customer and overall market needs (as opposed to satisfaction) are understood.
- A clear and consistently applied segmentation framework is in place at the detailed analytical level and at an operational level that drives differences in the ways that customers are actually managed. The segmentation extends beyond financial value into dimensions such as needs, attitudes etc.
- There is an explicit customer dimension to business planning activity that considers planned revenue / margin improvements, by customer segment, by the value drivers that will deliver them. The range of competitors likely to impact the organisation’s ability to achieve these plans have been identified and their action / reaction is both predicted and monitored.
For more insight into customer-centric business model innovation as well as more insight into this particular area of the REAP Customer-Centric Blueprint, please see my book “The Customer-Centric Blueprint’ – http://amzn.to/ZILg4y
Filed under: 21st century Government, 21st Century Organisation, Best Practice, Business Models, Change Management, Competitive Advantage, Cost to Serve, CRM Models, Cross-sell, Customer Acquisition, Customer Centricity, Customer Experience, customer management, Customer Relationship Management, Customer Retention, Customer Strategy, Customer-centric government, Frameworks, Government of the future, Innovation, Leadership, Measurement, Sustainable Business Performance, Uncategorized, Upsell | Tagged: 21st century organisations, Big Thinking, business innovation, business performance, business strategy, capability areas, capability development, company strategy, CRM, customer centricity, customer experience, customer experience management, customer service, customer strategy, data integrity, efficiencies, EVA, execution, Insight & Planning, Inspiration, leadership, marketing, marketing ROI, organisational alignment, Sustainability, thinking customer |
Doug Leather's Blog 
Dear Doug
I hope this finds you well.
It is so good to hear from you and thanks for sharing information with us. For some time I was thinking may be you have decided to do something else. It has been quiet. Do you still have your sessions?
Kind regards
Thandeka Buthelezi
Executive Manager: Customer Services
Prasa Rail
Office: +27 11 773 1560
Mobile: +27 82 782 5820
Hi Doug,
Nice chatting to you the other day.
In regards your newsletter I just wanted to say how difficult it was in one of the projects I worked on to implement a behavioral segmentation system across their retail client base when in theory it looked like realistic and valuable project, the problem lay in the product and channel orientation of their operating construct, and that as such the data quality issues emanating from their ‘feeder systems’ on aspects like up-to date customer demographics were not at a level (on an ongoing operational basis) for a reasonable probability of customer classification or predictive modeling to be systemically applied… The project then became well nigh impossible as resolution would have impacted the construct of their operating model.
Kind regards,
Greg
Sent from my iPad
Hi Greg – thanks so much for your input. As you and I well know organisations that have developed their business models around product and channel require major leadership commitment and boldness in order to innovate through the lens of the customer. You’ve highlighted such a good example of an organisational ecosystem that cannot be meaningfully ‘customerised’ without major surgery. One wonders whether leadership is sufficiently enlightened to seriously review the current way they create, deliver and capture value (no doubt in an industry that is beset by ‘better sameness’ and mediocrity) and realise that the BIG opportunities lie in finding new and unique ways to create, deliver and capture value – through the lens of the customer rather than through the lens of the current business model – rgds, Doug