Developing a new perspective for the industry : Manage Customer Intimacy

Consumer manufacturers are experiencing the painful reality of highly disruptive trends in the marketplace. There’s pressure from commoditization, rapidly changing customer expectations and competition from non-traditional players. Companies need to deliver more innovative products and services, more quickly than ever. Traditional approaches to product and service development are no longer sufficient; it is clear that these companies have to find a smarter way to approach the marketplace.

Customer Intimacy should be the number-one priority over the next years. Innovation for its own sake is not enough. The real key to success is to get past the idea of manufacturing devices, get close to customers and create the experiences that they want – or even new ones that they never conceived of. It isn’t just about the product; it’s about how the product enhances your customers’ lives.

The idea of creating experiences that matter, rather than simply manufacturing devices, lies at the heart of competitiveness in today’s consumer marketplace. It’s actually not a new concept; decades ago companies like Polaroid understood that they were really in the business of creating memories, not just selling cameras and film. What’s different is that today, this focus on the customer experience has grown to the point where it practically overshadows the products themselves. They have become conduits for a transformed lifestyle, one that’s based on personalized content, rich interactions and new ways to make life more convenient and more enjoyable. It’s about what the device allows people to do, not what the device itself does.

That context is essential when considering new ways to innovate and generate revenue. To drive smarter product and service innovation, consumer electronics companies must know as much as possible about how products and services are used and how customers integrate them into their lives. They also need to know who their customers are so that they can relate and communicate to them based on customers’ terms.

There’s a valuable resource available that can help companies do exactly that: information. We are awash in data as never before. Billions of people, connected by close to a trillion devices, are talking – but are we listening? If not, we really should!

This is not a one-way street. Products and users no longer exist in isolation. Building new links to customers and leveraging highly interconnected technology allows companies to shape the interaction with their products and services, and in the process better understand what customers want. Or, with insight into how a game-changing new offering might impact the marketplace, the company can even get ahead of customers and redefine how they view the world in ways they never would have imagined.

Today’s consumer companies need to become businesses that create, orchestrate and manage customer experiences. To do that requires investment in a robust information, analysis and delivery platform. The means to tap into everything from demographics and usage history to point-of-event feedback is essential to creating insight. Smarter product and service development requires analysis of that insight to drive innovation. And finally, transforming the customer experience takes a way to personalize and deliver new services in real time – to stay in touch and put closer customer relationships to work.

Greater customer intimacy means a fundamental shift in the traditional manufacturer-consumer relationship. It becomes one of partnership – a mutually beneficial feedback loop in which your business leverages customer insight to innovate, and your customers become active participants instead of passive consumers. Both parties gain by increasing intimacy. The company wins by being better able to create compelling, differentiating customer experiences, and consumers win by getting what they want.

Customers participate in this partnership in myriad ways, both conscious and unconscious. Behaviors, usage patterns and preferences can be monitored, and real-time feedback can be gathered through direct interaction via social media and customer service contacts. The company can in turn become a greater presence in the lives of customers, providing better service, more appealing products and personalized content.

Most companies have invested in some key capabilities, such as customer information management and/or product lifecycle management, with the aim of enhancing the customer experience. However, it is important to recognize the holistic and interdependent nature of the overall effort. Spending on individual capabilities can produce good returns, but an end-to-end approach offers synergy that yields the maximum benefit. Companies that have made narrowly focused investments may be highly mature in specific areas, while still leaving a considerable amount of financial benefit unrealized.

For example, the value of customer data can be greatly enhanced through investments in analytics that drive deeper insight. Likewise, tying that insight to product lifecycle management can shorten time-to-market and produce superior offerings that are more in tune with customer needs and desires.

These capabilities are additive not only in the financial sense, but also in their contribution to the company’s overall readiness to innovate with renewed customer insights. Capturing data alone is exploratory in nature; understanding what’s happening without influencing it. Once the company progresses to optimize the insights through analyzing the collected data through sophisticated analytics and pursues to further enhance the experience, it is able to lead the marketplace rather than react to it.

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