customercentricity - Social Marketing Forum

Customer-Centricity: Four Guaranteed Ways to Estrange your Customers

“Reconnect your brand.” That’s the slogan one of my former customers, who is active in the marketing automation space, started using recently as part of a rebranding strategy. However, it’s more than a slogan. Customer-centricity, hower, often remains a hollow motto. Brands and businesses are really disconnected from their customerse. Marketing is broken as I recently wrote. It has to do with personality, processes, trust and living up to promises. Furthermore, the changes in how people inform themselves, interact and decide, alienate brands even more. So, if brands are alienated, the question is how they can “reconnect” as in my former customer’s slogan? Time for some ‘tips’. It was once believed that a brand was primarily a matter of positioning. However, the role of perception and reputation plays a more significant role in defining what a brand and business really is. Customer-centricity is no longer optional. … [Read more...]

Filed Under: Customer relationships, Opinion Tagged With: customer-centricity

The Social, Connected and Human Post-Crisis Changes In The Financial Industry

Recently, I had the pleasure to talk with marketing executives at some financial institutions and banks in mainland Europe. You might not immediately think “pleasure” when thinking about banks but to me, it really was a pleasure. The reason: during these conversations, I was surprised to see how far many of them stood regarding social CRM, cross-channel marketing, customer-centric business processes, mobile and increasingly content marketing and social media. In fact, when comparing the companies I talked with (of course I didn’t talk with all banks), with businesses from other verticals, it occurred to me that the financial industry was probably among the most innovating ones right now, if not the most innovating one. If my observations are more than that and indicate a trend, clearly there must be a reason for it. And of course there is a very good reason why many corporations can learn a lot from the banks and financial institutions I had the pleasure to connect … [Read more...]

Filed Under: CRM, Cross-channel, Social media marketing Tagged With: banks, CRM, cross-channel marketing, customer-centricity, data centralization, financial industry, mobile, single view, social crm

Social CRM: Customer-Centricity And The Need For Redefinitions

Customer-centric thinking and working is the main driver in all marketing changes, we are going through, including social media marketing, email marketing, etc. Customer-centricity is not some kind of slogan. It's a necessity for businesses and is achieved through direct and indirect processes of listening, understanding, providing relevance and optimizing the value of content, interactions and relationships from the customer viewpoint. Redefining Customers And Products To be and work customer-centric, businesses have to broaden their definition of a customer. It's not only the person that buys your products or services. It's also your employee (who buys security, an environment to realize his potential and respect), your investors, the media and all people that in one way or another are connected to your ecosystem. … [Read more...]

Filed Under: CRM, Sales Tagged With: community, CRM, customer relationship management, customer-centricity, value

Five Major Marketing and Communication Changes In The Social Media Age

The usage of social networks is increasing daily. Clearly, the whole social phenomenon is still far from over. Its impact for marketers and companies is huge. A whole new range of channels has joined existing interaction channels and have shifted the focus from communicating as in messaging to communication as a balanced mix of cross-channel dialogues where listening, and thus customer data, preferences and behaviour, are key. For marketers, this evolution constitutes an enormous opportunity, but also a major challenge. The attention of modern individuals is fragmented, and in this hectic communication reality they want to decide for themselves how and when and with whom they speak, both in private and with regard to business communication. Moreover, people can also disseminate information themselves via social channels, which can very quickly send messages all around the world. The social media (r)evolution has five major consequences for marketers. Note that this … [Read more...]