September 02, 2021
Driving better business with customer centricity and connectivity
By Carmen Cupido, Head of Legal at SEACOM
It’s more than just a buzzword. In today’s fast-evolving economy, customer centricity has become a priority for companies who want to build and nurture relationships with potential and existing customers. By putting the customer at the core of a business, a customer-centric strategy drives repeat business, enhances loyalty, and increases business growth.
To connect with customers and give them a uniquely personal experience, businesses are turning to innovative tech and digital solutions. Globally, 70% of organisations have a digital transformation strategy already in place, or are working on one. Being able to provide a customer-centric experience is a major benefit of digitising operations. Today, connectivity has the power to transform customer-centric businesses for the better.
When it comes to connectivity and customer centricity, businesses can benefit from embracing both.
Challenges facing customer-centric businesses
There’s no single definition of a customer-centric approach to business, so there can be no single cover-all solution. At its core, customer centricity is about using targeted metrics to better understand customers. It’s about designing customer-focused experiences, and using customer feedback to continually improve services. This outcome-driven approach helps foster long-term relationships. Research by Deloitte found that customer-centric businesses were 60% more profitable compared to companies not focused on the customer.
But you can’t simply become customer centric overnight. Adopting this strategy means overcoming certain challenges. Companies struggling to master customer centricity site things like insufficient expertise in data analytics, missing key technology platforms to manage data, and inefficient customer data sharing as critical obstacles. Fortunately, with the right tech solutions, these issues can be solved.
How can tech and connectivity help?
Customer expectations have evolved, making personalisation of services inevitable, especially for digital-native businesses. A key element of personalisation is communication. With an efficient CRM tool, you can communicate directly with customers from a variety of devices and collect valuable data. With the right cloud infrastructure and analytics, this data can be stored and interpreted, so you can better understand and serve a wide network of users. Finally, with the right Internet access and fibre solution, your digital platforms can operate seamlessly and uninterrupted, so you can optimise business processes and keep in contact with customers 24/7. By harnessing technology, customer experience can be prioritised and personalised.
Don’t forget the less connected
While digital-native customers are a key demographic for modern businesses, we can’t ignore the needs and expectations of our less connected customers, especially in South Africa where Internet penetration is still relatively low (56.3% in 2020). To narrow the digital divide, businesses need cooperation from public and private enterprises to ensure a connected future for you and your customers. A goal of digital transformation should be to create the best fit of services and capabilities to accommodate the needs and expectations of a vast spectrum of customers.
What comes next?
We all want to thrive in today’s digital economy. To get this right, connectivity providers themselves should turn their attention to their customers, and prioritise customer-focused operations, services and support to better inform long-term decision-making. In terms of customer-focused connectivity, connectivity providers should tailor their services to meet changing customer needs and solve common pain points.
Truly customer-centric companies deliver customer value in every business area, including how they communicate with and respond to their customers. Whether you’re updating communication tools, installing cutting-edge voice services, or using AI to interpret data, a reliable Internet connection is crucial in your journey to personalised, customer-centric services. There’s power in connectivity, and it’s time to embrace it with SEACOM.