Designing and executing a customer-centric business model requires end to end organisational alignment. Customer-centric capability development cannot take place in isolation to the rest of the business. The customer-centric journey requires a clear quantified understanding of current organisational capability across all 14 capability areas of the SCHEMA® Customer Management framework in the centre of the REAP Customer-Centric Blueprint below. As important as an understanding of current customer management capability is, so too is an understanding of the capability to which the organisation aspires.
Each week I’ll address another single capability area, sharing with you the Transformation Intent to which your organisation should commit to, as well as ‘What Good Looks Like’ for those organisations that have achieved a fairly high level of maturity in the respective capability area.
The REAP Customer-Centric Organisation Blueprint®
This week we are dealing with Insight & Planning which is one of the six Enabling capability areas represented. The Enablers explore the components needed to energise your transformation and will invariably involve changes that can be planned for within the current business cycle, for implementation in the next budgetary or operating period. These components support your capability to implement your chosen customer strategies and rely on the fundamental building blocks (Foundations) already discussed in Part 1 to 4 of this series of blog posts.
Transformation Intent – Insight and Planning
“Whereas data management ensures that the quality and priority of critical customer information enables a customer-centric approach, insight and planning translates that data into meaningful patterns of customer drivers and behaviour. With this understanding you can transform your approach to defining your customers’ needs from an outside-in perspective, thereby segmenting them correctly and, thus becoming capable of delivering a relevant and superior customer experience, while being mindful of your competitors’ manoeuvres.”
What Good Looks Like – Data Management
- The current and changing nature of customer transactional behaviour is understood in its own right and in terms of how it relates to other behaviours. Non-transactional behaviours (both on-line and off-line) are captured and analysed as well as being researched at the market level.
- The nature and relative importance of own-customer and overall market needs (as opposed to satisfaction) are understood.
- A clear and consistently applied segmentation framework is in place at the detailed analytical level and at an operational level that drives differences in the ways that customers are actually managed. The segmentation extends beyond financial value into dimensions such as needs, attitudes etc.
- There is an explicit customer dimension to business planning activity that considers planned revenue / margin improvements, by customer segment, by the value drivers that will deliver them. The range of competitors likely to impact the organisation’s ability to achieve these plans have been identified and their action / reaction is both predicted and monitored.
For more insight into customer-centric business model innovation as well as more insight into this particular area of the REAP Customer-Centric Blueprint, please see my book “The Customer-Centric Blueprint’ – http://amzn.to/ZILg4y
