Customer Centricity in Primary School

Let me set the scene first: I come from a different generation, I went to Primary school in the eighties, and from a different part of the world in the Middle East but currently residing in the beautiful shores of Australia…

Recently I attended an Art Night at my boys’ primary school, which was mainly running as a fundraiser by purchasing their artwork and help the school to fund some new additions to the library.

Part of the cheese & wine setup, which was a delight, we also toured their classrooms, to familiarise ourselves with how the kids spend their days and potentially understand how they go through the educational processes set by the teachers and their assistants.

I was having a chat to one of the parents, on how the classroom feels very different to what we experienced in our days, and somehow, I could not stop myself from floating back to my professional passion.

See, a classroom from the eighties felt pretty much like an Outbound Marketing Campaign. All students sitting there, facing a big black board, a teacher shooting out information in one direction, mass-market style, hoping to catch as many students as possible. It was a One-Size Fits-All education, where attention was not given to the individual students’ needs & passion. The curriculum was mainly put together and enforced by THE committee who met somewhere, brainstormed amongst a group of grownups, what the 10 years old kids would love to learn and know about for the next few years.

You could see the books, at the beginning of the year, know exactly what will be learning 9 months from now, and don’t bother with any updates as there will be none!

Fast forward 35 years, and the classroom setup is called “Activity based”, kids huddle pretty much in an agile manner, to do different things on different days and times. There’s an Art corner, STEM corner, Reading chairs, Lab, Debate arena and many more in their classrooms.

I now don’t know my boys’ curriculum, I know what they are studying generally, each term, from the newsletter we receive, but they mainly focus on research, presentations and debates.

No more sitting to face a black board, or any board for that matter, but they collaborate in teams of 3 – 4 kids at a time and work using Google Slides/Docs to exchange comments and prepare for their presentations. I’m talking Year 3 kids of course! Each student can research his or her own beloved plant, country or figure, within a generic topic of course and bring that back to the table.

Again, aligning that with what I do for a living, I couldn’t imagine but a very parallel universe for how we are working on Customer Centricity in our marketing today, for how customers are not happy with that bulk email, direct mail or phone call asking them say if they would like to change their electricity provider.

How we try to evaluate each and every customer, their needs & priorities, Machine Learning & Artificial Intelligence and real time feeds from thousands of sources to present the Next Best Conversation to these Customers on each interaction on every channel each time.

I run an Elite team of Customer Decisioning SMEs, where we try to move into real time evaluation for every conversation we have with our Customers, and believe it or not, we sometimes feel the content of the email we send to a customer might not be relevant by the time the Customer opens that email… How daring is that?

Customer Centricity is the FUTURE, like it or not, it is there today even in our primary schools, as we are shaping our next generation of Customers to be more Demanding, more

Relevant and more Genuine!