Today, consumers expect personalized solutions to their service and product needs (Clow and Baack, 2016). Due to the consumers’ increased ease of switching and higher customer demands, retaining high-value customers is predicted to become highly important, especially in the financial industry (Deloitte MCS Lim-ited, 2013). Hence, improving and enriching the long-term customer experience has become essential for organizations (Goldenberg, 2017).
The current uncertain economic environment and changing customer de-mands require marketing amongst customer service to drift towards personal-ized customer experience and precisely targeted messages. At the same time, cost-effective customer management and optimizing the marketing budget and ad spend have become rising themes in organizations. (Deloitte MCS Limited, 2013; Clow and Baack, 2016.) Thus, cost-efficient growth strategies resulting in increased customer satisfaction and effective customer-analytics strategy turning insights into sales growth are required (Teerlink & Haydock, 2012; Sleep & Hul-land, 2019).
According to Sleep & Hulland (2019) one of the biggest challenges mar-keting is currently facing is trying to implement customer-centric strategies while simultaneously dealing with big data. Evidently, many organizations have an excessive amount of customer data available from an increasing number of vari-ous sources including CRM systems, transactions, social media, online purchases and face-to-face interaction (Teerlink & Haydock, 2012; Sleep & Hulland, 2019).
However, organizations that are able to harness the data and turn it into customer insights, can achieve greater customer knowledge and improved service re-sponse and as a result, can build competitive advantage (Manyika et al. 2011;
Schroeck, Shockley, Smart, Romero-Morales & Tufan, 2012). Goldenberg (2017) states, that the key to getting enhanced and more productive long-term customer relationships is engaging with customers and continuously learning from each
engagement. Thus, the customer analytics that aim for generating recommended offers for customers based on their behaviour is required to go forward.
As stated, data and analytics activities are expected to build competitive advantage and improve customer experience. Hence, developing and imple-menting data-driven strategies will become an increasingly important business asset (Barton & Court, 2012; Brown & Gottlieb, 2016). According to the research by McAfee and Brynjolfsson (2012), data-driven organizations are five percent more productive and six percent more profitable than other organizations. Those organizations that understand their existing stage of data-driven decision mak-ing, the value of big data, and their internal capabilities that support the imple-mentation of a higher level of data-driven decision making, are capable of providing value to both customer and the organization itself (Sleep, Hulland &
Gooner, 2019).
Organizations need to utilize customer insights gained from big data to continuously improve marketing activities and eventually, innovate and design new ways to utilize big data (Tellis, Prabhu & Chandy, 2009; Story, O'Malley &
Hart, 2011; Erevelles, Fukawa & Swayne, 2016). Systematic data analysis and data-driven decision-making enable organizations to shift from business-centric to customer-centric marketing strategy, which is likely to result in stronger cus-tomer relationships, higher cuscus-tomer value and better cuscus-tomer satisfaction (Lee et al. 2012; Deloitte MSC Limited, 2013; Leeflang et al., 2014). Further, the alliance of marketing and technological tools drives smarter decision-making and productivity and enhances profitability (Manyika et al. 2011; Schroeck et al., 2012).
Analytics and deriving a deep understanding of customer behavior is ne-cessitated to deliver efficient, relevant, personalized and engaging customer ex-perience and eventually, increased return on marketing investment. Further, in-creased growth and customer satisfaction can be achieved while simultaneously decreasing unnecessary costs. Moreover, increased customer satisfaction and loyalty positively contribute to customer retention and revenue. (Ginovsky, 2010;
Teerlink & Haydock, 2012.) Also, Woodcock & Stone (2012) state, that regular customer interactions and introducing renewal or additional offers are likely to reduce the value decay of existing customers.
A seamless multichannel marketing strategy can help further to increase customer loyalty and conversions and provide ease of use and convenience for
customers through consistent customer experience across all channels (Teerlink
& Haydock, 2012). Accordingly, businesses should aim for an omnichannel al-ways-on marketing approach where marketing communication is delivered to customers when it is most relevant to them an in the channels the customers want to use, instead of a blanket campaign marketing approach. Thus, marketing should move from using channels in silos to a model where one channel is in-forming or triggering the communication in another channel. (Deloitte MSC Re-view 2013; Stone & Woodcock, 2014.)
The success to move from product-centric to customer-centric marketing strategy depends on the organization’s ability to know its customers through proactive, real-time analysis – who the customers are, what devices they use, what content they want to see and when, or if they resist the attempts to build a relationship (Woodcock & Stone, 2012; Stone & Woodcock, 2014; Sleep, Hulland
& Gooner, 2019). Woodcock and Stone (2012) emphasise the importance of inte-grating marketing, sales, service and operative silos to develop a customer man-agement process and ensure the customer experience and interaction is efficient and coherent throughout the customer journey. Creating a coherent customer ex-perience resulting in personal, long-term customer relationships requires close cooperation, especially between marketing and IT (Sleep & Hulland, 2019). Fur-thermore, the transparency between the business operations is likely to lead also to reduced customer management costs (Woodcock & Stone, 2012). To conclude, successful transition requires aligning the organizational structure, performance metrics, internal processes (particularly customer-facing activities), and organi-zational culture to be focused on fact-based marketing to satisfy customer needs and requirements (Shah et al. 2006; Teerlink & Haydock, 2012).
Figure 1 summarizes the external demands, components, organizational capabilities and potential outcomes of customer-centric marketing derived from the research literature. The external demands to execute customer-centric mar-keting strategy come from both customers and the competitive environment. The components of executing customer-centric marketing activities are listed on the left. The organizational capabilities and requirements in order to successfully im-plement and manage the customer-centric marketing strategy are named below.
Finally, the potential outcomes and benefits from a customer-centric marketing strategy are listed on the right.
FIGURE 1 Customer centric marketing demands, components, capabilities and potential out-comes (adapted from e.g. Teerlink & Haydock, 2012; Stone & Woodcock, 2014; Brown &
Gottlieb, 2016; Sleep, Hulland & Gooner, 2019)