Middle market companies focus on orienting towards the customer
A customer-activated enterprise leads to deeper, more relevant relationships.
A customer-activated enterprise leads to deeper, more relevant relationships.
To truly respond to a customer’s needs in a rapidly evolving business landscape, middle market companies must engage with their customers on an integrated digital and physical level. And the way to achieve that state of being is through the creation of a customer-activated enterprise, according to an IBM global C-Suite study titled The Customer Activated Enterprise.
This approach moves customer collaboration beyond the fringes of a company into the very heart of its business strategy. That’s because even a customer-centric approach isn’t enough since that focuses primarily on a sales-based day-to-day interactions with customers. A customer-activated approach goes deeper because only by orienting themselves toward a customer on every level can middle-market companies create a deep enough level of trust that leads to true engagement.
Keys to establishing digital-physical integration
By employing a strategy that cuts across a number of potentially separated silos, including IT, marketing, supply chain management, sales and the C-Suite, middle-market companies can create more opportunities for engagement through social channels, harvest that data, communicate in a more in-depth way with customers, and apply that data to their ongoing business operations.
Strategies that support those goals include:
• Integrating social, mobile and digital networks to create what McKinsey describes as an “on-demand” marketing orientation that encourages seamless 24/7 interaction with customers through a variety of social platforms.
• Harnessing technology to leverage the data gained through on-demand marketing so that middle-market executives can apply the information gained through ongoing customer interactions to shape strategy, new product and service development and improve the overall customer experience.
• Moving rapidly to establish new relationships with customers through multiple digital and physical channels, which carry the potential to generate additional revenue and sales leads, according to a report, Aligning Physical and Digital Presence published by The Corporate Leadership Center.
• Creating a deeper level of both internal and external collaboration, where internal barriers to customer engagement are subordinated to overall enterprise goals. In this kind of culture, a customer’s needs and experiences truly activate the entire enterprise. A conflict-ridden, silo-oriented enterprise is doomed to fail in this collaborative environment.
The IBM survey notes that 60 percent of the middle-market leaders surveyed believe that the current economic environment requires a higher level of transparency and collaboration, with customers and stakeholders being seen as possessing an equal hand in creating business value as internal partners. That’s a tremendous shift in perception — the awareness that without ongoing insight and collaboration from customers and stakeholders, a business won’t have the flexibility to stay ahead of the curve in a fiercely competitive economy.
A final word
There’s no one-size-fits-all model for a digital-physical channel alignment. However, both the digital and the physical must be utilized — without digital engagement on a broad scale, middle market companies will lack the scale of engagement to understand what their customers need.
And as most middle-market companies still have physical offices and facilities, those must be employed to integrate the data gained via digital channels. Creating a true customer-activated enterprise focused on relentlessly improving the customer experience is a multifaceted, ongoing endeavor that leads to deeper, more relevant relationships.
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