Great insights on how important customer centricity is in todays marketing strategy. The following article speaks to 15 stats about customer centricity and how they can affect your business. The Page Group has always felt that to understand and focus on those things that the consumer connects with about the brand is central to developing a strategy to fulfill those needs, and by doing so you build a stronger loyalty with those consumers. Customer Centricity is a philosophy that we adhere to as we look to develop programs that truly work and deliver a consumer experience that is world class.
15 Mind-Blowing Stats About Customer Centricity
Last month’s article about customer centricity here on CMO.com described it as “a mind-set that companies need to adopt throughout the entire organization—not just marketing—to thrive in the digital world.”
Few marketers would disgree, yet the majority are still not executing. This week’s stats highlight the challenges marketers face, as well as the benefits of having a customer-centric strategy in place.
POLL: What’s the biggest hurdle holding your organization back from true customer centricity?
1. Customer-centric companies are 60% more profitable compared to companies that are not focused on the customer.
2. Using data to inform decisions is at the center of customer centricity. However, executives view the flood of incoming data as part obstacle and part opportunity, with 61% of CMOs admitting they have a long way to go still in using big data properly.
3. A lack of clear ownership of the customer also is holding companies back from a true customer focus. This lack of centralized customer ownership has resulted in a scenario where 48% of marketers are only moderately confident in the ability of their organizations’ core touch points to reach and engage with the customer.
4. Ninety percent of marketers say that customer individualization is a priority, and that’s because they’re learning that the more personal the approach, the greater the chance of a positive response.
5. Customer service is a key component of a customer-centric strategy. Eighty-six percent of respondents to a Harris Interactive survey said they would pay more if they could guarantee superior service. Eighty-nine percent of respondents who had recently switched from a business to its competitor did so because of poor service.
6. Banks and other financial institutions have significantly increased their customer focus recently, increasing the number of customer-centric jobs by 52% in the last year.
7. Enterprise brands, like multichannel retailers, are asking their customers to set their own preferences: Brands today are 62% more likely to give their subscribers the ability to set their own preferences for branded communications than they were in 2013. Further, they are 89% more likely to allow them to select the type of messages that they receive and 48% more likely to give options for how often subscribers want to receive those communications.
8. Marketers recognize data’s role in customer centricity and are taking action to improve their data hygiene: Marketers are 53% more likely to execute data hygiene techniques than they were in 2013. Retailers are 13% less likely to undertake some form of data-hygiene process than nonretailers. However, when they do prioritize data hygiene, retailers are 38% more likely to use a data-hygiene provider than nonretail brands.
9. Sixty-three percent of CEOs see rallying their organizations around the customer as one of the top three investment priorities this year.
10. Nine out of 10 U.S. CEOs say they are strengthening their customer and client engagement programs this year.
11. For most marketers, customer centricity is an aspirational goal but not yet a reality. Here’s why: 70% have suboptimal or no ability to integrate customer data between online and offline sources; 80% don’t apply customer value scores; and, 74% can’t recognize customers in real time.
12. According to consumers, customer service agents fail to answer their questions 50% of the time.
13. It takes 12 positive experiences with a brand to make up for one unresolved negative experience.
14. Forty-five percent of B2B marketers feel their levels of customer centricity are good, if not high. And 45% believe their customers would say that customer-centricity levels are good to high.
15. Creating a happy customer is not a marketing-only endeavor—customer service, product development, R&D teams, operations, and IT all play a role. However, just 12% of B2B marketers said that functional teams were strongly aligned around a holistic customer experience strategy.
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