When Customer Centricity Slides into Customer Obsession
Customer centricity is a given in any digitalisation or digital transformation efforts. There is a long history of customer centricity, and you are welcome to google it or ask ChatGPT. Customer centricity became more obvious at the time when Agile was introduced and widely spread. The Agile Manifesto has 2 of its 12 principles that contain the word customer and basically preached that Customer needs to be satisfied and bring value to them. The idea of having a working product in the manifesto is exactly the point for customer centricity, to show your customers how a product looks like and not bore them with all the mountains of documentation and firefighting. So you would think the customer is king and obsess with what they want. But even a king can make mistakes here is my thoughts on avoiding the pitfalls when customer centricity slides into customer obsession.
Huh? Customer Obsession
Welcome to Customer Obsession could be a cousin of customer centricity, not a widely used term and it was something that I came across when I picked up this book during COVID period. The book is called “Customer Obsessed: A Whole Company Approach to Delivering Exceptional Customer Experiences” and you will be able to find traces of quotes from AMAZON Chief Jeff Bezos mentioning “Customer Obsession is a way of inventing on their behalf”. AMAZON has always been a forefront of customer centricity. You can find insightful information on their website here.
Ask and reflect, with AMAZON as the darling and the race to achieve 10X growth, could you be sliding into customer obsession. Is your customer now treated like sacred cattle in your farm. All these happen when 2 movements came about, read on below.
The Agile Manifesto and Explosion of Web 2.0
Customer centricity coincided or mutually drove 2 movements. The Agile mindset and Web 2.0. The Agile Manifesto and its principles are not meant to be prescriptive. It acts as a guiding hand to help you achieve the highest value that can be delivered to your customer and still retain team integrity. Created back in 2001, it was at a time of Web 1.0. Then, we were still fiddling with HTML with colorful CSS and transacting on centralised websites. Darcy DiNucci introduced the term Web 2.0 in 1999 and took off later in the mid-2000s. With customer centricity and agile, the introduction of Web 2.0 gave rise to popular platforms that we are still using today, such as AMAZON (we can argue AMAZON is a first mover of web 2.0), AirBnb, Uber, Grab, etc, you know what I meant and know them as well as I do. As a customer myself, having a vacation in London in the Spring of 2015 couldn't be better. I could move from one place to another easily on Uber and stay at a nice apartment in East London; All value of money. This phenomenon can be attributed to the Platform Economy or 2-Sided Marketplace, and the many terms to describe it. Let’s stick with Platform Economy for now. These platforms were built with the customer in mind, and it drove the need to know your customer (your sacred cattle) which also means collecting all bits and pieces of data about them in your platform (your farm), sends out survey, ratings, etc. Accepting their every feedback. All the collection and probing regardless the usefulness of the data. Now it’s starting to get toxic, invasive, and perhaps a little creepy.
Avoiding the Pitfalls of Customer Obsession
Now, don’t get me wrong, there is absolutely nothing wrong with customer obsession. However, even cattle deserve better, and a farmer needs to work smart. Take a step back or pull out the stop sign. Discuss within the team or yourself if you are following the crowd because everyone appears to be doing it and so should you, or the customer is always right? Just remember 3 things:
Innovate or Die
Your customer does not know what they want. Chasing after what they tell you about their wishlist or following the clues from the current processes could result in a wild goose chase. Imagine solving a problem only for another to sprout out, realising that you are fishing a red herring. There have been many companies that faded due to their stubbornness to venture out and only worked to keep its customer happy or built customer loyalty. Remember, the competition is always there to snatch your customer away regardless of the loyalty. They will find innovative ways to stand out. For example, the wavering of consumers between IOS and Android, Netflix over Blockbuster, Blackberry priding itself as a business device provider and so many more. Hence even when you are keeping our customers happy, find a balance to introduce innovations. like Jeff Bezos said, invent for your customer.
Diversify Your Customer
Not all customers are the same, even a farm has a diverse range of farm animals. Focusing too much on a particular customer or persona can result in alienation of other customer segments. Remember that your customer is aging and growing, their needs changes such as maturing from a party goer to a parent. Just look at grab, there’s more than a dozen of transport options today for different needs, although JustGrab could still be the most popular option in use. Similarly at Blackberry, sticking to business users, they got out of the game soon enough.
Know Your Customer (KYC) Just Enough
Finally, collect what is necessary. Not all data is needed, collecting too much data can be detrimental to your customer experience and also increased cost of maintaining your operating cost. From a risk management point of view, collecting data not required and stored can be a breach of trust with your customer.
Disclaimer: All opinions and interpretations are that of the writer, and not of MITB. I declare that I have full rights to use the contents published here, and nothing is plagiarized. I declare that this article is written by me and not with any generative AI tool such as ChatGPT. I declare that no data privacy policy is breached, and that any data associated with the contents here are obtained legitimately to the best of my knowledge. I agree not to make any changes without first seeking the editors’ approval. Any violations may lead to this article being retracted from the publication.
