Adopting A Client-Centric Approach Is The Future Of Business

According to Forrester Research, 90% of customer service decision-makers believe that good service experience is critical to their company’s success, and the importance of customer experience is on the rise.

Cape Town (I-Newswire) February 27, 2013 - According to Forrester Research, 90% of customer service decision-makers believe that good service experience is critical to their company’s success, and the importance of customer experience is on the rise. As competition increases in a shrinking market, a strategic push for companies to re-orchestrate their business around a client-centric approach becomes more important.

Several processes and systems have emerged to improve the customer experience and ensure the customer is at the centre of a business’s philosophy. Analytical data has advanced to reflect the promise of CRM, as more behavioural data can now be analysed; marketers are able to identify meaningful customer segments.

However, data is constantly evolving, and moreover, data exists in siloes; by department, by social media platforms, by business, and where it has been created by customer services. Interactions with companies originate from a multi-channel journey of multiple touch-points that are used to gather information and insights. Insight is derived from all customer interactions, by understanding customer requirements, watching user interactions and placing customers’ needs over product priorities. Combining customers with products and data is the specific approach companies take to become fully client-centric; however, according to a study by Coveo, only 7% of organisations feel they bring together customer, product and project data from all sources and share it among product development, sales and marketing, and customer service.

The formidable challenge to embed a client-centric focus into a business’s culture must start with customer programmes. Plans and processes must be established to place the right people and technology in place to support customer interactions. Superior customer service rests on the accuracy of customer information and the ability to derive insights from the tactical data. With the capture of data, companies are far better positioned to make rapid, intelligent decisions about service delivery and performance optimisation across all departments. A client-centric approach requires customer services to become more interconnected in order to ensure better and faster collaboration with sales and marketing.

The use of different processes and technology solutions, including quality monitoring, multimedia interaction capture, speech and data analytics, quality monitoring and contact centre management can generate significant improvements in customer service and improvements in productivity.

“At a strategic level, customers are the rarest resource of a business, and a client-centric approach should build stronger predictive segmentation and validate contactability. Matching your customers with their needs and obtaining the correct information for engagement will increase your returns, because it’s recognised that 20% of your customers give you 80% of your revenue, says Julian Ardagh, CEO of Effective Intelligence.

Ardagh says companies should look internally at their policies and processes to evaluate if the business really supports greater customer service. Effective Intelligence, which has recently launched AddresXpress, a rapid addressing tool, has excelled in offering companies solutions that support client-centric processes.

A successful business operates with a client-centric culture and understands the importance of customer loyalty. Making use of data, information and intelligence brings business processes together to promote successful customer experiences and interactions. All processes within a company have the potential to impact customer experience, and customer-facing employees are only as effective as the company enables them to be.