Customer-centric ecosystem: From push to pull to predict

“Get closer than ever to your customers. So close that you tell them what they need well before they realize it themselves.” — Steve Jobs

Understanding consumers’ lives.

Traditionally companies focused primarily on their own slice of their consumers’ lives and wallets — what their customers bought through point of sale, loyalty programs and promotions — and used that information to improve campaigns and engagement. Today opportunities are arising to make sense of insights around the broader aspects of customers’ lives — where they go and when, what they buy, what they look at or “like”, what they watch and with whom they are connected. As companies capture an increasing amount of data on their customers and get smarter at extracting insights from it, they can assemble those insights to form a more precise, often real time understanding of what their customers want. Both Apple and Google, for example, are leveraging the new technologies in smartphones to understand the context of their customers’ lives — the when and where of their behavior and purchases. Facebook seeks to understand their customers’ social graphs — who is connected to whom and who recommends what to whom. Thus companies have evolved from marketing or “pushing” products they hoped would find buyers to “pulling” customers into new ways of experiencing a personalized offering. Now the challenge and opportunity is to predict where the customer is going next, so they can get there first.

To do that, companies need to understand:

? Customers’ Five Mys — motivation, attention, connection, watch, wallet — and how they work together

? Customers’ context — their lives, needs and the forces that open and close their wallets

? The ecosystem, not just the industry, in which you and your customers interact

Using the insights throughout the organization and the ecosystem.

What could putting customers first mean in reality? Like people everywhere, companies are facing information overload. The challenge is in finding ways to use information to improve customer centricity, but not just to retain or find customers for the business as it exists today. Rather, the goal should be to use information to evolve the business so it can anticipate customer needs and thereby improve the experience for all customers over the long term. This analysis might point to products or experiences that you can only deliver by gathering new insights or forming new partnerships within your ecosystem.

The new era is not only about engaging with customers differently but also building products differently based on real time customer insights. From there, companies can leverage those insights across the organization, within the supply chain and among partners, to create a value exchange with the customer and others in the ecosystem that have a shared interest.

From push to pull to predict

Push – where we’ve been: a world in which customer focus meant developing and distributing products and services based on the assumed or created needs of broadly defined customer segments

Pull – where we are: in an age of digitization, companies are increasingly able to refine and verify their understanding of what customers want, and then personalize products, channels and new ways to engage

Predict – where we need to go: an evolving era in which the most advanced companies take steps to understand and analyze a sophisticated array of customer information so they can anticipate and meet customers’ needs when, or even before, customers know what they want

To learn more about how “push, pull, predict” plays out among specific industries and to download the complete report on navigating the evolving consumers, Me, My Life, My Wallet, click here. This is the inaugural report from KPMG International’s Global Customer Insight Program, based on comprehensive, customer-focused research methodology from Global Customer Center of Excellence and the Innovation Labs.