Customer Centricity is Social

Customer Centricity  - How to Leverage Social Media

Social networking has been an area of focus for many retailers, yet few have a handle on precisely how to fully capitalize on the burgeoning trend of social sites and social users.   While these Social Media sites often offer a new delivery channel for advertising, there is far more potential to the Social infrastructure when taken into the context of Customer Centricity.

Customer Centricity is a paradigm shift where the retailers view their customers as the organizations Core Asset - and find products that match the individual; as opposed to viewing the product as the Core Asset, and the role of the organization to be finding customers to which they can sell their products. I blogged about this recently here.

In the context of a Customer-centric philosophy, the more I know about my customer the more I can intelligently meet their needs.  Existing Retail data can only take us so far, as I can make assumptions about past purchases, but I am not often aware of enough about a given individual to be truly personal in my communication.  For this reason, many Marketing departments have leveraged third party sources to augment their data in meaningful ways, such as gaining demographic information, and in some cases psychographic data.  These exercises have been meaningful in segmenting groups of customers, but typically not leveraged in highly personalized communications.

I often say that it is the in-store associate that is the most customer-centric part of any retail environment. This is due to the open dialogue with the customer, and the ability to ask targeted questions about needs, lifestyle, life events, etc.   This is a fairly typical part of any mid to high-service environment.   

With the advent of Social Networking, and open API’s, however, there is a wealth of information available to retail organizations that answer many of the questions an associate might ask, and can in fact provide details well beyond the capability of an associate to ascertain.  There is a wide variety available for most Social sites which can provide a wealth of information unique to a very specific customer. Likes, friends, favorite sites, comments and more are available through the many Social APIs. From this data retailers can now get a true 360 ° view of a customer – related to the retail brand, but also in a more social environment.

The immediate challenge for retailers is in linking Social customers with in-store and on-line customers. This requires technologies capable of storing the data consumed across these new channels, as well as incentives for customers to share this data with the retail organization. While these are clearly not small obstacles, many retailers are coming up with creative ways to do gain access to data, and top technology vendors are providing solutions that can leverage this data (more on this topic in an upcoming blog).

The future of Customer-centric solutions is one where there is a view of the customer as an individual – inside the store, online, and in social engagements. Armed with this true Omni-channel data, retailers are then equipped to provide highly personalized and unique value to each customer through real-time recommendations, offers, promotions and more.