CIO’s Digital Agenda XXV: Customer-Centricity is a Digital Theme

How to become a customer-centric business is in every forward-thinking organization’s agenda.

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Digital is the age of customers. Thus, Customer Experience Management is key to the success of every forward-looking business. It is not just important, it is vital for growth, development and to make sure you stay in business, Both retaining a customer and winning a new customer are very important to every business’s surviving and thriving.

Customer-Centricity is a Digital Theme

• A Customer-centric mind: How to become a customer-centric business is in every forward-thinking organization’s agenda, it requires not only management but each digital professional to shape such a customer-centric mind, think from the lenses of customers, outside-in, instead of inside-out, more specifically, what’s the thought processes evolve and how to shape a customer-centric mind?

• A Customer-Centric Strategy:  In essence, the digital era is the age of customer; customer-centricity becomes the goal to right fit business’s purpose –to create more customers. However, since there are many elements to customer-centricity, the key to success is to focus on something that will "move the needle." For some companies, it's the customer experience; for others, it;s product excellence. And some can build loyalty through low cost/price., etc. So how should forward-looking organizations craft their customer-centric strategy?

• How IT Change Management Aims at Improving Customer Experience? Digital is the age of the customer, being a customer-centric business is in every forward-thinking organization’s agenda. Corporate IT plays a significant role in digitizing every touch point of customer experience and sharpening key business capabilities. IT implementations are core to strategic changes today. However, many IT organizations fail to reach customers’ expectation fully. Did it achieve the original objective? Did the customer experience actually improve significantly? And, how sustainable is the change or would it break down? Has the entire organization embraced it well? What are the IT change management principles & implementation best practices?

• Customer-Centric Innovation: One of the key characteristics of digital business is customer centricity. Thus, the customer is absolutely a vital part of the overall innovation process. Customer-centric innovation accomplishes far more than incremental product improvement, it can also build evolutionary business models, as well as path-breaking products and services that establish new categories, and even internal process improvements arise from customer-centric innovation.

• Five Steps IT Customer Satisfaction Surveys Go Beyond Routine: Most of the CIOs think IT customer satisfaction surveys help them to listen to users, adjust IT roadmap & plan to accommodate changes customers’ need, and help evaluate IT performance; But some IT leaders argue such survey is just a routine, won’t help IT from out of touch, ivory tower service, the survey result may not be objective to capture the truth what IT need, and psychology behind survey may not be so positive to help IT improve performance. Is there value in regular IT Customer Satisfaction Surveys? What’s the best way to do it?

• What are the best ways to demonstrate IT value? IT is at the cross road, some high-performing IT organizations have built solid value proposition, and moved up its maturity to become the game changer and business catalyst in their companies. However, the majority of IT organizations get stuck in the lower-level of maturity and struggle to prove their unique value, for helping the business gain competitive advantage.  So what are the best ways to demonstrate IT value, through analytics or metrics up front; through business cases or portfolios; through governance discipline; through agile practice or just through business-IT mutual understanding?

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Posted in: IT Transformation,Sum UP