A customer dialogue that will grow into a trusted relationship

Gam, Hi.
When we talked this morning I was thinking about how all that wonderful stuff that you believe in and understand so well, could be distilled into some Recognisable Points Of View that are easy for others to ‘get’.

• Customer Information (Data) is now the decisive weapon of competitive struggle in the marketplace. Affordable packaged applications for customer profiling and event monitoring will eat at the advantage previously held by large organisations like ours [..].
• We want to create a business where the customer exchanges meaningful and accurate information for prescribed benefits. This means transferring authority to the customer (empowerment). Customers who do not receive a return on the information they provide are going to turn the information tap off entirely.
• An individual’s desire for recognition is the new pervasive force in commerce. The customer is screaming, ‘recognise me’, ‘recognise my lifecycle’, ‘recognise my personal values’, and ‘recognise my financial value’. Customer Information strategies will be increasingly critical in responding to this.
• The power of information increases in proportion to the number of attributes of information that are stored about the subject. We have an abundance of raw data but a dearth of meaningful information and actionable insight. The way forward is not to get more data but in learning how to utilise it.
• We believe in mass customisation and how customer intelligence will help us provide it. The space that separates us from adherents of mass marketing is broad and deep. There is no longer a middle ground. It is a battle for the heart and soul of the organisation.
• A firm belief in uniformly low prices and high visibility distinguishes the mass marketeer from us, the information warriors. We believe in that the customer will prevail and to benefit we need their information.
• It is only through customer intelligence down to the individual level that we will understand the value of our customer base. We are not interested in market segmentation identifying the customers to serve, but in identifying which services consumers wish to have and how they wish to partake of them
• The empowered customer needs to be built in as a fundamental attribute of the product and proposition, if not, then process efficiencies will erode a customer-centric afterthought
• We can truly find a ‘Blue Ocean’ that drives enormous brand value by adopting a model of information permission not surveillance. Let’s create a customer dialogue that will hopefully grow into a trusted relationship.
• There are several reasons why doing this is hard : organisational inertia in face of change, data integration challenges, concerns over privacy and an innate fear of letting the customer own the relationship. We have strategies to overcome each of these.

Darren