Are you a CoCo? If you are indeed a customer-obsessed company — or CoCo for short — then you don’t stop at merely thinking about your customers. Their wants and needs define and shape all of your operations. What distinguishes a CoCo from the rest is its customer experience management mentality and the growth rewards it reaps. But how did customer-obsessed operations come about? And is it really beneficial to be a CoCo?
Let’s start with the first question. The emergence of customer-obsession has a lot to do with the current era we’re living in; particularly the conditions affecting business-customer relationships. Historically speaking, the era from 1900’s to 1960’s was known as the Age of Manufacturing when the main consumer demand was for mass manufactured cheap goods as exemplified by Ford automobiles. This was followed by the Age of Distribution (1960’s-1990’s); functionality, global connections, and improved transportation systems developed by companies like Wal-Mart and Toyota were the key features. The period between 1990’s until 2010 was aptly named as the Age of Information as computers and internet became the central method of business thanks to giants like Amazon and Google.
Yet, the digitalisation of the customer experience (CX) is even more prevalent in our current Age of the Customer; empowered buyers demand new levels of customisation, service, and engagement. Technology favors customers a lot more than businesses today as institutions are slower to react and adapt. This has resulted in brands demonstrating a new mentality to combat the customer experience challenge: customer-obsession. In this new business cycle, the power has shifted back to the people, and engagement means everything. As Pisano, we know this very well from our own CX platform and how people react to it with gusto.
Let’s move on to our second question. There is a pretty good reason why the start of Age of the Customer is set at 2010. Over the last few years, unprecedented number of brands stepped up by putting the customer first in all of their operations. Take Amazon.com CEO Jeff Bezos as an example. About moving beyond retail and now to media with a customer focus, he said: “We’ve had three big ideas at Amazon that we’ve stuck with for 18 years, and they’re the reason we’re successful: Put the customer first. Invent. And be patient.”
You can’t expect successful results by just paying lip service to customer-centricity. It’s those brands that are truly “customer-obsessed” seeing positive results by getting their loyal customers to come back again and again. According to Bain & Company, a 5% increase in customer retention can increase profits by 25%, up to 95%. A Watermark Consulting analysis also supports this focus on customer satisfaction. Taking five years of data from Forrester’s Customer Experience Index, this analysis shows that the brands at the top of the index show far better stock market and revenue performance than customer experience laggards. So, it really does pay off to be a CoCo.
Let’s win in the age of the customer together. The risk in today’s customer-led market isn’t responding too early; it’s responding too late. Pisano provides your business real-time customer insights and detailed reports — the fuel for complex, high-stakes customer-obsessed operations. Are you ready to go CoCo with Pisano’s real-time customer experience management platform?
