Customer Centricity vs. CRM

(Excerpt taken from Stephen Hewett's paper "The right way to do the right thing for the customer")

The essential mindset behind Customer Centricity isn’t new. Visit the open market at Marrakech in Morocco - or any other busy marketplace in the world, for that matter - and you’ll see the concept of Customer Centricity at work, at least at the most successful stalls. It has, in effect, been around since the very dawn of business. Our modern economy is more sophisticated than the market at Marrakech, though the need for making customers feel special is no less paramount.

Businesses often like to relate new strategic concepts to old ones, and so Customer Centricity is increasingly regarded as both a descendant and replacement for Customer Relationship Management (CRM), which many regard as a failed concept.

Whether or not you yourself agree that CRM was a failure, the CRM approach of regarding customer service as something you can instil merely by installing a (very expensive) piece of software usually fails to work unless your business is highly customer centric already.

The problem with CRM systems is that they tend to paper over an organisation’s deficiencies in the area of customer service. The effect is less ROI on the CRM system than might otherwise have been the case, while the underlying problems go unresolved.

Customer Centricity, however, does not come packaged in a box. It isn’t something you can just pay someone to install and then go back to going about your business pretty well as you did before. Instead, Customer Centricity is an entire strategy for running your organisation so that you focus every aspect of what you do around the needs of your customers.

Customer Centricity can be defined as the alignment of organisational structure, processes and technology to deliver products and value-added services to internal and external customers in the most agile way.

Perhaps the most important point to make about Customer Centricity is that technology is just one part of the story, and to become customer centric an organisation really does need to look hard at crucial factors such as its culture, processes and ways of doing things before it brings in any facilitation technology. Becoming customer centric then, is not just an item on the agenda of a Board meeting, it is THE agenda.

It is also, in case you might have forgotten, why you’re in business in the first place.


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(Download the full whitepaper “The right way to do the right thing for the customer”)