The rapid rise of global competition, combined with the adoption of Internet-based communications and cloud processing power, has created a state of hypercompetition across most industries. The antidote? Become customer centric. Here's a brief business and IT roadmap to make it happen.

2. THE
CUSTOMER-
CENTRIC
IMPERATIVE
IN TODAY’S
HYPER-
COMPETITIVE
GLOBAL
BUSINESS
ENVIRONMENT

3. The rapid rise of global competition, combined with the adoption of
Internet-based communications and cloud processing power, has
created a state of hypercompetition across most industries.
This phenomena was outlined by Dartmouth Professor of Strategy
Richard D’Aveni, who defined the term hypercompetition as the
challenge presented by innovative, aggressive, or even predatory
competitors. If the barriers to market entry are low or minimal,
competitors can easily and quickly move into your market. Their entry
can quickly erode whatever competitive advantage you may have
created for your brand or brands.
The Wharton Business School is credited with identifying a key
competitive response to the threat of hypercompetition, namely “a
continuous process of scanning the dynamically changing competitive
environment and consumer behavior trends.”
In other words, becoming a “customer-centric” organization.
A STATE OF HYPERCOMPETITION

4. THE DEFINITION OF
CUSTOMER CENTRICITY
The concept of customer centricity
was originated in the 1980s and
defined most thoroughly recently
by Wharton Professor Peter Fader,
author of Customer Centricity:
Focus on the Right Customers for
Strategic Advantage.
There is a difference between the
concept of customer focus, which
means “offering a consistently
great and relevant experience
to customers”, and customer
centric, which means “looking at
a customer’s lifetime value and
focusing marketing efforts squarely
on that real-world, high-value
customer segment to drive profit.”
Fader argues that “too many
companies are customer friendly,
but not customer centric. In other
words, they treat each customer
the same, missing an opportunity
to discover who their best
customers are.”
Concepts such as “customer
experience”, which encapsulates
the ease and delight in which
customers engage with your
organization on all levels, should be
considered a subset of customer
centricity.
Forrester actually tracks the
Customer Experience Index, which
seeks to measure the highest
performing companies in the
area of customer experience and
measure their results vs. the S&P
500. According to Forrester, upon
looking back on previous data
starting 2007 to present, “the CEI
200 has outperformed the S&P
500 Index by generating a 10.7%
annualized rate of return.”
Forrester also provides a Customer
Experience Ecosystem Playbook
to guide organizations in the
employees, partners, policies,
processes, and technologies
required for delivering excellent
customer experiences

5. IT MANDATES FOR
CUSTOMER CENTRICITY
“Everything you do has to begin and end with the customers;
otherwise you shouldn’t be doing it.” – Multinational CIO
Of course, like any strategic initiative, beginning a journey toward
customer centricity begins with the support of senior management
and must be embedded within the organization’s culture. It takes
commitment and persistence for any strategic initiative to take root
and produce measurable results.
One of the most tangible and enabling forms of commitment that
executives can deliver is in the form of information technology.
IT provides the capabilities and competitive advantages that turn
inspiration and strategy into process and performance. CIOs play a
critical role in enabling an organization to execute market leadership
strategy of choice, whether it be product leadership, operational
leadership, or customer intimacy.
From our perspective, there are three core IT foundations required for
any organization to move toward becoming a customer-centric entity.

6. INFORMATION The free flow of information between organizations and their
customers and partners, and between their internal team members,
forms the basis for several critical requirements for becoming a
customer- centric organization:
• Understanding which customers are most valuable (Customer
Lifetime Value, among other potential metrics).
• Understanding customers’ current and future needs.
• Understanding competitive threats in realtime.
• Tracking the organization’s performance against customer-
centric goals and following through on accountability and
rewards for performance.

7. iINTERACTIONS Customer experience has become an important initiative in the
hypercompetitive marketplace. Customers can be won or lost in
split seconds, as any analysis of ecommerce shopping-cart leakage
can attest. But customer experience goes beyond website shopping
experience. It includes intelligent, personalized experiences such as:
• Email communications.
• Print communications, such as direct mail and billing inserts.
• Mobile communications, including real-time, contextual offers in-
store or at an event.
• In-store kiosks and intelligent checkout systems.
• Social media engagement (“systems of engagement”) combined
with customer relationship management (“systems of record”).
• Customer support call centers.
• In-person engagement via sales or customer support
representatives empowered by mobile devices and connected to
cloud-based customer data sources.
Every step of customer engagement has the opportunity
to be tracked and enhanced for improved customer
experience.

8. INFRASTRUCTURE
An organization’s information technology (IT) infrastructure has
never been more important. All of the above competitive assets
can be inhibited or completely destroyed by a data breach (see
Target and Michael’s Stores, among other recent examples) or the
inability of your team members to gather, understand, and act upon
customer and market information.
Critical infrastructure issues related to the customer centric journey:
• Security – Customers obviously share less about themselves
and their needs if they have less confidence their information will
be kept secure.
• Cloud scalability – Organizations must be able to rise to the
occasion with the computing capacity required to maintain
service during peak levels. The availability of utility-like cloud
computing power can help the organization reach customer-
centric milestones faster and, often, less expensively.
• Cloud applications – Employees, partners, and even customers
are expecting to create, collaborate, and gain access to
needed information regardless of their location. Cloud-
based applications can expand the capabilities of the entire
organization and value chain.
COMPETITIVE ASSETS CAN BE
INHIBITED OR DESTROYED

9. CUSTOMER-CENTRIC
BUSINESS PROCESS

10. Of course, uniting these capabilities into a day-to-day customer-
centric reality requires well-defined business processes upon which
IT systems are designed and implemented. CIOs are aware that many
siloed business applications have ended careers and set companies
in inferior positions vs. their competitors. For over ten years, industry
analysts and practitioners have lamented the lack of return on
investment delivered by most CRM systems, for example.
“Customer-centric companies use every customer touch point to
stimulate interest, close business, satisfy a need, or demonstrate
commitment to the relationship.” – Yankee Group, Customer-Centric
CRM: Fully Optimizing CRM
Process guru Janne Ohtonen expresses it this way: “Process
excellence is a way to produce successful customer outcomes. In a
service economy, what you make is not the competitive differentiator,
it is why your organization exists, how you deliver your services,
and what you do for your customers. The customer experience your
organization produces to its customers is the biggest asset you have!”
Customer-centric organizations inherently understand this formula:
Processes deliver customer experiences; customer experiences
drive repeat business and word-of-mouth, which drive growth and
profitability.
CUSTOMER CENTRIC
COMPANIES USE EVERY
CUSTOMER TOUCH POINT

11. ASSESSING CUSTOMER
CENTRICITY
HOW DOES YOUR
ORGANIZATION
COMPARE TO LEADING
CUSTOMER-CENTRIC
ORGANIZATIONS?

12. CULTURE AND EXECUTIVE
SUPPORT
Has your leadership team charted a course towards orienting your organization towards customer centric leadership?
◎ Customer centricity is the core of our strategy and processes.
◎ We’re in execution mode but haven’t reach goals yet.
◎ We’re planning but haven’t yet launched.
◎ “Customer” doesn’t really define priorities around here.
Are your teams incentivized to focus on the most valuable customers (MVCs)?
◎ We wake up and go to bed with these priority customers in mind.
◎ We’re getting there; at least we know who they are.
◎ If someone could tell us who they are, we might focus on them.
◎ We don’t know and don’t really care who the MVCs are.

13. INFORMATION
Do customer-facing and product/service development teams have access to a steady flow of customer information that keeps your entire
organization focused on winning, keeping, and growing customers?
◎ We err on the side of ensuring team members have access to information in a secure, access-anywhere manner.
◎ We ensure key managers have access to information, but it’s not an integral element of the organization’s overall business approach.
◎ Capturing data and turning it into actionable information is a challenge around here.
Do partners and customers have access and incentive to update information in your systems as part of a broader network of intelligence?
◎ Yes, through secure extranets, our customers and partners feed us valuable information, which we turn into value for them.
◎ Customers and partners share information with us, but not through real-time or secure systems.
◎ Information is one-way, from our teams to theirs.

14. INTERACTIONS
Have you comprehensively mapped all the customer experience touch points, including channel, retail, and web partners and developed a plan
for improving the overall integrated experience?
◎ Yes, we know our touch points and have made progress in improving the overall experience.
◎ We’re in the process of identifying and improving integrated customer experience.
◎ We’re uncertain of what the experiences are like at various customer touch points or how to improve them.
Do you make the lives of customers and partners easier through well-designed web-based and/or mobile systems and tools?
◎ We’ve saved customers money and increased their loyalty through systems and processes that make it easier to do business with us.
◎ We’re beginning to learn what our customers’ needs and preferences are in this area and are planning to make changes.
◎ We’re not the easiest people to do business with, quite honestly.
Are your team members in sales, service, support, and delivery plugged into business systems that make it easier for them to service
customers?
◎ Our team members have access to secure real-time customer and product/service information via their mobile devices.
◎ Our team members can get a question answered in a reasonable amount of time, but usually not while with the customer.
◎ Team members have to work pretty hard to get answers back to customers, or proactively find ways to serve them.

15. INFRASTRUCTURE AND SECURITY
Have you completed a comprehensive security assessment and implemented a continuous, proactive security plan for your organization?
◎ Yes, we have a systematic and persistent security risk assessment and mitigation process in place.
◎ We’ve assessed our security ecosystem and are making plans to build a proactive process around protecting it.
◎ We have not fully assessed our security ecosystem and may have significant security gaps we’re unaware of.
Are your team members fully equipped with access to reliable, integrated mobile productivity and analysis tools regardless of where they may
be working in order to understand and respond to customers?
◎ Our team members have 24/7 secure access to the productivity and analysis tools they need to do their jobs.
◎ Our team members have access to integrated productivity and analysis tools but are limited when traveling or not at their desk.
◎ We’re limited in the capabilities we provide team members due to poor system uptime and lack of connected tools.

16. BUSINESS PROCESS AND PILOTS
Is your organization operating from a comprehensive map of customer- centric business processes in order to prioritize the development of
competitive capabilities?
◎ Yes, we have a stack-ranked list of critical business processes that we’re systematically making more streamlined and effective.
◎ We’re in the process of mapping our processes!
◎ We currently have no process map or list of critical priorities to improve for customer experience and competitive improvements.
Does your organization have an efficient process for piloting and scaling new business applications and systems to improve return on
investment?
◎ Yes, every business process and IT project goes through a predictable planning, piloting, testing, and scaling methodology.
◎ Depends on the department or situation; some do, so don’t.
◎ Things are a little ad hoc around here; we could use a better method for our business IT madness.

17. LAUNCHING
YOUR
CUSTOMER-
CENTRIC
INITIATIVE

18. How can your organization get
started on a serious initiative to
grow and profit through customer
centricity?
Plus Consulting advises the
following steps for business
and IT leaders:
• Analyze most valuable
customers. Based on your
culture, competitive situation,
and growth/profit goals,
determine what criteria you
will use to determine which
customers should be sought,
cultivated, or avoided.
• Map customer-facing business
processes. Consider how your
sales, marketing, production,
delivery, and support
processes intersect. Envision
where they can be streamlined
and/or prioritized to pivot
based on the requirements of
your most valuable customers.
• Identify low-hanging fruit
processes. Doing so will
help you know where to
automate and/or improve
from a customer experience
standpoint.
• Assess and develop a
customer-centric security
strategy. If customers can’t
trust you with their data, they
will not trust you with their
business.
• Assess and develop an
infrastructure and information-
needs roadmap. Identify
the capabilities your sales,
support, and development
teams need to deliver on
customer centricity, and
decide which are most critical
to deliver short-, mid- and
long-term?
• Pilot the IT-enabled process.
Consider the power that
advancements in mobile,
cloud, business intelligence,
collaboration, social media,
and marketing automation
provide.
• Scale the process. Keep
in mind the significance
of security and cloud-
enablement. .
• Begin the next wave of pilots.
By now you’re getting good at
this, so why not keep going?
IDENTIFY LOW-HANGING FRUIT

19. ABOUT PLUS CONSULTING
Plus Consulting empowers senior business and IT leaders of growth-
oriented organizations to become more customer centric and
competitive. We develop innovative business-focused solutions that
improve an organization’s information, interactions, and infrastructure
capabilities to lay the groundwork for customer-centric growth and
profitability.
• Information – Business intelligence and content management
• Interactions – CRM, marketing automation, mobile and web
extranets, intranets, and external sites
• Infrastructure – Security, cloud, management, productivity
A perennial winner of “Best Places to Work” recognition, Plus
Consulting combines the top business-minded technical talent
with leading technology partners such as Microsoft, SalesLogix,
SugarCRM, and others to develop powerful business solutions via
CRM, business intelligence, collaboration, messaging, security,
infrastructure, and cloud services.
For references or questions, please contact info@plusconsulting.
com, visit www.plusconsulting.com, or call 412-206-0160.
Plus Consulting is a Gold Certified Microsoft Solution Provider

20. REFERENCES
Day, George S. and Reibstein, Gary (2004) Wharton on Dynamic Competitive Strategy, John Wiley & Sons
Fader, Peter (2004), Peter Fader on Customer Centricity and Why It Matters. Retrieved April 2, 2014, from http://knowledge.wharton.upenn.
edu/article/peter-fader-on-customer-centricity-and-why-it-matters/
2014 Customer Experience Index. Retrieved April 2, 2014, from http://solutions.forrester.com/customer-experience/prove-roi-49RA-161472.
html
The Customer Experience Ecosystem Playbook. Retrieved April 2, 2014, from http://www.forrester.com/The+Customer+Experience+Ecosyste
m+Playbook/-/E-PLA490?objectid=PLA490
Rowsell-Jones, Andrew (2007) Driving Customer-Centric IT. Retrieved April 2, 2014 from http://www.cio.com.au/article/205119/driving_
customer-centric_it/
Kingstone, Sheryl (2004) Customer-Centric CRM: Fully Optimizing CRM. Retrieved April 2, 2014 from http://www.ianbrooks.com/useful-ideas/
articles_whitepapers/Customer%20Centric%20CRM.pdf
Ohtonen, Janne (2013) Process excellence is all about the customer. Retrieved April 2, 2014 from http://www.bpmleader.com/2013/10/01/
process-excellence-is-all-about-the-customer/

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