Identify where your company is on the journey to customer-centricity

Queueing People

Do you have a loyalty programme?

  1. No - we have been in business for more than 30 years and know what our customers want.
  2. No - our focus is on keeping prices low for all customers. But we use other methods to make sure our finger is on our customers’ pulse.
  3. Yes - we collect data on our customers this way and use the insight it generates to drive decisions on everything from store design to promotions to new product development.

How does your business respond to changing customer demand?

  1. What do you mean by changing? Our customers want what they have always wanted.
  2. We look at what our competitors are doing, and copy it if our customers tell us they’d like us to do it too.
  3. We constantly monitor customers and customer segments to check that the insight on which we base our business decisions still holds true.

Do you know why lapsed customers and your competitors’ customers don’t buy from you?

  1. No - we don’t actually know who shops with us and who doesn’t.
  2. We focus on maintaining existing customer loyalty, but also monitor people who come to our website and don’t buy, to look for clues on how we could improve our offer.
  3. We use our customer segmentation to profile shoppers in the general population that we have the best chance of converting and then target them with special offers.

How confident are you a new product will fly off the shelves?

  1. The buyer who selected the product hasn’t been seen photocopying their CV yet; we are pretty confident it will do well.
  2. We have done trials funded by a supplier and worked out how much to charge and which opening offers to create to maximise sales.
  3. The idea for the product came from an online customer panel. We have used loyalty card data to track its success in regional trials, so we know it isn’t cannibalising sales of other products.

How tailored are the emails you send out to customers?

  1. We only began collecting email addresses last year, so we send everyone the same email. Lots are removing themselves from our mailing list.
  2. We have some basic data on each customer and that means we try not to do things like send offers on children’s products to single men.
  3. We consider customer segment, their previous transaction history and the offers that they have responded to before when we email them. This is largely automated, so it is almost as simple as sending one email to all.

Do you have a single view of each of your customers?

  1. Any view would be nice - we have no way of matching transactions to customers in one channel,let alone across channels.
  2. We have a single view of some customers, who use our store card for purchases in-store and online. But this is only a sub-set of our total customer base.
  3. Our loyalty card allows us to track customers across channels, and we can talk to them about recent purchases, whether they were made online, in-store or via mail order.

Do your different channels share insight?

  1. No - our store and web operations teams compete.
  2. Our merchandisers are beginning to use insight gathered from our website to ensure that we maintain maximum margins for our product.
  3. Yes, our buying and merchandising team uses data that has been collected from all channels when it is optim-ising allocation and replenishment, and making mark-down and clearance decisions.

Answers

  • Mainly 1s Customer insight is yet to make much of an impact on your company. It may be that you are completely focused on price, but even so, being able to forecast what your customers want next could help you sell it to them more cost-effectively.

  • Mainly 2s You are beginning to listen to what your customers are trying to tell you through their actions and feedback, as well as what they actually purchase. Not all parts of the business will be able to make use of this kind of insight yet, but you are laying the foundations for becoming a customer-centric business.

  • Mainly 3s You are setting the pace that others will follow in terms of how you turn customer data into insight that your business can use. Employees are getting accustomed to having this insight at their fingertips, and the result is that you should be better than your competitors at forecasting the future, as well as knowing what customers want from you today.

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