HOW TO TRANSITION FROM PRODUCT-CENTRIC TO CUSTOMER-CENTRIC

EXPERIENCE

E N T E R

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Table of Contents

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Distinguishing Product-Centric and Customer-Centric Experiences

Identify Your Brand’s Purpose and Value

Find and Nurture Internal Champions

Focus on Assessing Customer Lifetime Value

Implement a Decision Hub with Artificial Intelligence (AI)

Utilize Machine Learning and Arbitration Strategies in the Decision Hub

Analyze and Adjust Professional Incentives

Monitor Your Initiative’s Success

Find a Partner to Guide the Transition

02

Distinguishing Product-Centric and Customer-Centric Experiences

Despite the resources at enterprises’ disposal, some still struggle to create meaningful relationships with their customers.

A recent study from Forrester Research found 59 percent of consumers rated their experiences as just “OK.” In addition, 23 percent of respondents rated their experiences as “poor” or “very poor.”

Most businesses’ CX suffers because they rely on product-centric engagement tactics in an attempt to foster customer loyalty. Product-centric strategies focus on identifying broad audience segments

and pitching certain products to those demographics. The actual person’s wants and needs are secondary.

Customer-centric engagement, on the other hand, places the customer at the center of each interaction, analyzing their unique behavioral data to create meaningful contextual interactions that match individuals’ desires and needs. This eBook will help you transition from product-centric to customer- centric strategies.

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59%

23%

Identify Your Brand’s Purpose and Value

The root of every customer-centric strategy is to provide balanced value at each interaction.

You should define “value” as any action that satisfies a priority customer need, adds to their likelihood to promote your brand, and operates within constraints of the business. To determine how you can deliver valuable interactions, look back on the services and products you offer and ask:

• Which needs could my products and/or services fulfill? Are they the highest priority?

• Why would a customer choose my brand over a competitor?

Answering these questions entails analyzing prospect and customer behavioral data and gathering feedback from promoters and detractors. While the behavioral data will reveal how customers interact with your brand assets (stores, websites, representatives, and so forth), the feedback provides an opportunity to learn why loyal customers prefer to interact with your brand above others, and what is driving some customers the other way.

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Find and Nurture Internal Champions

Find leaders who can not only explain what customer-centric experiences are but also have the ambition and vision necessary to implement customer-centric strategies. Look toward a decision-maker capable of:

Identifying resources and technologies positioned to foster customer-centricity.

Building a business case for the value of customer-centric transformation, getting key stakeholders (including members of the C-suite) on board.

Making adjustments to existing business processes (and creating new ones) in order to support the transformation.

Executives converted to a customer-centric approach must then determine which changes are necessary within their respective departments. How much of an impact will customer-centric efforts have on current operations? How can they get others on board, setting the right goals and incentives to promote a customer-centric culture?

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Focus on Assessing Customer Lifetime Value

You want to develop enduring relationships with customers who increase the financial worth of your business.

In order to do that, you need to identify each individual’s customer lifetime value. Despite the fact that CLV enables businesses to connect with people who consistently spend more money than others, 45 percent of marketers said they do not have good visibility or accurate valuations around CLV and retention rates.

Calculating a customer’s CLV entails gathering first-party purchase data on the individual in question to serve as the basis for forecasting the person’s long-term revenue potential. Metrics such as customer revenue per order, number of orders per month and the total order value can help you achieve this goal.

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Implement a Decision Hub with Artificial Intelligence (AI)

Data from your website, customer relationship management solution, stores/branches, and other channels all indicate what specific individuals desire at particular times.

However, it’s impossible to simply sift through gigabytes of information and know which actions your business should take to accommodate customers.

In this situation, marketers should turn toward technologies that continuously learn from multiple customer interactions, no matter where those instances occur. A single-authority decision hub with Artificial Intelligence with machine learning delivers this responsiveness.

Connecting to the right data sources, this technology must be an “Always-On” engine capable of:

• Identifying optimal customer engagement actions in real-time.

• Arbitrating and orchestrating next best-action decisions to ensure each interaction is consistent across all channels.

• Connecting with applications responsible for customer interactions, including CRM systems, websites, email, stores and so forth.

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Utilize Machine Learning and Arbitration Strategies in the Decision Hub

It’s important to emphasize that the Decision Hub must possess machine learning (ML) functions that provide personnel with accurate predictions of what specific customers will do next.

Given what ML can do, it’s not surprising that it is one of the top three technology trends accelerating business innovation, according to Gartner.

Despite its capabilities, ML isn’t static and automatic. Data scientists and business analysts must employ decision strategies that govern and “guide” the Decision Hub on how to arbitrate the operational impact on customer experiences.

These decision strategies may include financial risk models and retention models. While the latter detect and monitor warning signs of customer churn, the former determine the fiscal and economic responsibilities to the business, such as a whether a loan should be approved.

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Analyze and Adjust Professional Incentives

Adjusting existing processes to support customer-centric experience does not go far enough.

C-suite executives and mid-level managers must analyze how the incentives (under which day-to-day staff operate) impact the organization’s ability to deliver customer-centric experiences. Leaders must evaluate each position within the company and ask the following questions:

• Which reward systems encourage staff to abide by customer-centric principles?

• Which processes discourage or prevent personnel from supporting customer-centric operations?

In addition, ensure all customer-facing personnel are supported by your Decision Hub. This is essential to ensuring staff act consistently, deliver relevance, and consider the context of each interaction while engaging customers and see the repercussions to the business after the fact.

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Monitor Your Initiative’s Success

Transitioning from product-centric experience to customer-centric experience may come with numerous obstacles and setbacks.

Those leading the customer-centric initiative must measure progress, and continuously monitor day-to-day operations to not only detect issues but also make adjustments to avoid those problems in the future.

Champions need a management console highlighting KPIs that reveal the overall impact of customer-centric engagement efforts.

Use a dashboard that shows trends for:

Acquisition and Response Rates.

Conversion Rates.

Customer Value.

Retention and Churn Rates.

NPS and Customer Satisfaction.

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Find a Partner to Guide the Transition

To reduce the risk associated with the endeavor, consider the benefits of collaborating with a partner that can help you utilize data, people, process, and technology to reach customer-centricity.

Implementing a Decision Hub with AI poses challenges to those unfamiliar with such a solution. A partner capable of delivering this technology must also be able to:

• Identify solutions that can fulfill specific needs.

• Reduce the need to outsource to multiple software vendors.

• Streamline current operations toward customer-centricity.

If you want to learn more about what to look for in a partner, get in touch with Pegasystems today.

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About PegasystemsWe are Pegasystems – dedicated to streamlining business and enhancing customer engagement. Our Global 3000 customers rely on our dynamic, strategic applications to drive excellence in their sales, marketing, service and operations. We seamlessly connect our customers with their customers across channels, in real-time.

Our adaptive, on-premise and cloud-based apps – built on our unified Pega platform – empower people with comprehensive visual tools to extend and change applications to meet strategic business needs.

To learn more, please visit www.pega.com.