How to become a customer-first organization

Key takeaways: 

• Commit to data-driven personalization 
  Challenge your assumptions. Don’t rely on outdated ideas about your audience, but make decisions based on real-time, behavioral and intent data to deliver personalized experiences. And remember, implement based on how your customers really act, not just what they say!

• Embrace customer-centric business models
  As generational demographics shift not just the consumer market, but B2B buying markets, customers demand more control over engagement and purchasing channels. Be it ecommerce, chatbots, or subscription services – successful businesses will be led by customer demand and personalized decision-making. 

• Accelerate decision making
  Adopting a measured attitude to risk can open major new opportunities. Choosing new platforms is an introspective process – accelerate drawn-out decision-making to foster a culture of pace and innovation; and empower your employees to spend more time on high-impact customer-centric projects. 

• Leverage AI and automation
  Be diligent in seeking and harnessing AI and automation opportunities. AI will make it easier to build proprietary software solutions and integrations for personalization, provided you can lay the right foundations and achieve AI readiness.

The consumer market is shifting. ‘Gen Z’ is expected to make up 27% of the global workforce by 2025 (Zurich). In the same year, Gen Alpha is expected to reach critical mass in the consumer market (Gallup). This generational shift has massive implications for growing businesses. Digital-native workers and buyers have grown up served by cutting edge personalized offerings from the likes of Apple, Microsoft and Netflix.  

Now, they’re bringing those expectations into the workplace. 

In this ‘how-to’ personalization webinar, Ryan Forrest, Global Director of Strategy & Insights at Bluprintx, reveals the strategic shifts that businesses must take to become customer-first organizations. Ryan’s session is available in full, on-demand, right here with Bluprintx. Or, read on for more of the key insights.  

Adapting to the buyer’s market 

Businesses must shift their mindsets in order to adapt.  

Buyers are in control. There is no single, linear journey that a buyer makes. And in a busy market, your business is not ‘the’ purchasing channel – it’s just one of many.  

That means if you can’t meet customers on their terms, you’ll lose business.  

More than ever, growing businesses must be led by data. By closely scrutinizing explicit and implicit behavior signals, firms can begin to understand their customers and offer the personalized journeys that they demand. This is the journey to adaptive selling, delivered through Personalized Journey Management.  

Lessons from lockdown 

Businesses and consumers stepped out of the Coronavirus pandemic and its ‘lockdown’ period into a vastly different world. But, Ryan believes there’s a lot that ambitious businesses can learn from what was a radical moment for innovation. 

Enterprises found themselves facing a lockdown period which offered the choice, ‘adapt or die’. Major strategic shifts and new business models that might have taken years to introduce were brought online in a matter of weeks. Subscription models, curbside collection and all-new ways of interacting with customers. The appetite for risk was much higher, because the alternative was unthinkable.  

Ryan believes there’s space for some of that attitude in the modern day. Growing firms will be rewarded for making big decisions on customer-centric models rather than getting mired in drawn out procurement and implementation processes. With unshakeable buyer demand set to become a new frontier for growth, is your business ready to make tough decisions at pace and start delivering for customers?

The building blocks of Personalized Journey Management 

Personalized Journey Management is a mini-ecosystem you can build to start serving your customers the way they want. Comprising customer 360 strategies, intelligent automations and workflow optimizations that electrify your business productivity; it is the clear path to bringing personalization online in your firm.