customers – The Business of Social Media

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Focusing and organizing your company around the customer, not functions or products, is the only way to become truly customer-centric. While loyalty and rewards programs are a great tool to increase engagement, they are only one part of becoming customer-centric. Not only does David Norton’s The High Roller Experienceprovide a roadmap for building a strong loyalty program, it also shows how Harrah’s/Caesar’s casino group created a truly customer-centric company.

Put the customer at the center

By definition, to be customer-centric, you need to put the customer at the center of your company. The leadership of most businesses build their organization around product line, business unit, or geography, which makes it quite difficult to take a customer-centric approach to running the company. The customer becomes a by-product of the organization’s design rather than the core around which the company revolves. As Norton writes, “customer centricity means that the customer is the company’s and not an individual business unit’s. It is an ability to interact with the customer cohesively and consistently regardless of which business unit the customer is dealing with.”

You also need to put the customer at the center of your data. Norton writes, “being able to truly understand the customer and present relevant content at the right moment through the right channel is the holy grail for which companies should strive in order to engender deep loyalty from customers. Data and technology can enhance the customer experience while simultaneously driving incremental profits for the company. “

To achieve this convergence of data and technology, you should build cross-functional task forces that include analytics, technology and the various functions that interact with the customer. These teams can then derive how to understand the individual customer behavior and integrate the results at each touch point so the customer gets the optimal experience for them.

It is more than loyalty

Being customer-centric is much more than loyalty. While Norton created Total Rewards, Harrah’s incredibly successful loyalty program, he writes, “loyalty is about understanding your customers in detail and interacting with them in a highly personalized way at every point of contact with your brand.” Loyalty is about more than a rewards program where customers are fixated on point accumulation and the company is primarily concerned about the cost of contingent liability. It is about interacting with the customer across their entire journey, at every interaction with your company.

It cannot be product specific

As mentioned earlier, you cannot be customer centric if you are focused on product lines or types. You need to look at the customer across all of your products. This focus also then allows you to help the customer find the products and experiences that are most likely to resonate with them.

Looking at the customer across products also enhances the lifetime value of the customer to the company. If you set up your data and organization around the customer and not product, you can predict who of the low-value masses has the potential to shop across products, largely by looking at demographic and behavioral factors. You can then target these customers so as not to confuse the individual product positioning in mass advertising.

Put the customer at the center

With customer now expecting a personalized and great experience, and getting it from the top companies (Netflix, Amazon, etc), you need to move from a 20th century company to a customer centric company. Blow up your organization and structure it around the user. Build your analytics and business intelligence so it tracks the customer journey and allows you to touch every player individually the right way at the right time. When you build your company around the customer, you build it to succeed.

Key takeaways

Being a customer centric organization is much more than having a great loyalty program.
You need to structure your organization around the customer, not along product lines or geography or channels.
Your data also needs to be customer centric, understanding the customer at all points of their journey and ensuring that it then feeds this data back to given the customer the best personal experience for them.

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The problem with early users

Early players are by definition early adapters. They probably have a higher preference for innovation and are more likely to take risks. They may have different ways of making decisions, including whether they monetize in a game, if they invite friends or if they come back. An early player may be very enthusiastic and tell friends but then go on to the next shiny object, so basing decision on their play would suggest you should focus on getting them to bring in as many users as possible before they leave.

Companies run into problems if they base product decisions on these early adopters, which is often the case. Eggers also points to research that shows early adopters are different. According to Eggers, “early adopters are typically younger, more willing to take risks, more eager to try new things, more affluent, and substantially less numerous … First, what worked with early adopters isn’t likely to work with later adopters. In launching new products or services, start-ups tend to accumulate deep knowledge about customers at the leading edge of a technology. But that knowledge doesn’t necessarily apply to other consumer groups; that’s one reason so many new firms struggle to create second rounds of offerings. To be successful, companies need to innovate for the consumers they want, not the ones they have.”

Another issue comes up because early adopters do not want to see the product expand to the mass market. A chess app may appeal strongly to grandmasters but if it becomes something the mass-market plays, the grandmasters may no longer want to use the product. Similarly, Facebook lost some of their young users when their parents started using it, but there were hundreds of millions more adults than teens. Although it worked for Facebook, the influx of users so alienated the early users of MySpace, you may no longer even remember MySpace.

A solution

There are several strategies to combat the problem of having a product that either is not attractive to new users or alienates existing users:

Innovate for future users. Build features and new content so it appeals to new users, what people not currently using your product would want.

Engage early adopters. By engaging your customers, you ensure they feel connected to the product. Letting them have a voice, even if you cannot always listen to it, keeps them engaged and likely to cope with changes they do not consider ideal.

The key is understanding that what appealed to your first users, and their behavior, is not necessarily what will drive your growth.

Key Takeaways

Early users will not have the same preferences and consumption patterns as customers you attract later in the product’s life cycle.

If you slavishly build features and new content for existing users, it may not appeal to new users.

The key is to innovate for new users while keeping your early adopters engaged so will tolerate the changes to the product.

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Put the customer at the center

It is more than loyalty

It cannot be product specific

Put the customer at the center

Key takeaways

Like this:

The problem with early users

A solution

Key Takeaways

Like this: