Being Customer Obsessed

So, what does the Age of the Customer mean for businesses and marketers?

Well, gone are the days of inside-out strategy. Organizations that don’t approach their offerings and customer experience with a customer-first attitude will fail to win and retain customers. Forrester Research calls this being customer obsessed, whereby the organization, throughout every function, department, and role, approaches business with the customer in mind (Leaver et al., 2016).

According to Forrester, customer-obsessed organizations do the following things (adapted from Leaver et al., 2016):

• Propagate this approach throughout the organization, making it a company culture. This means that leadership models through example, pushing this philosophy down through the organization. With everyone in the organization on board, a customer-led approach will permeate every possible touchpoint a customer might have.
• Have organizational structures and processes that facilitate this approach. That includes the right hiring and retention practices, a lack of departmental silos, and agile change mechanisms. These things make collaboration and the ability to pivot easier.
• Capture the right success metrics and use them to generate insights. Customer-obsessed organizations go beyond traditional customer-satisfaction assessments and dig deep into the minds, hearts, and lives of customers to understand how they can be better served and reached. They analyze their data using more sophisticated techniques and move beyond these data to situate the results within the context of the business, generating rich, actionable insights.