Customer centricity is no longer enough

The massive amounts of data that businesses have gathered, both from research and from consumers themselves, have had the unintended consequence of shifting the emphasis in customer centricity toward managing the data rather than connecting with people, a Kantar report says.

Why it matters

Customer centricity has been a proven strategy for above average performance, but it is Kantar’s contention that this is now effectively table stakes and that businesses need to think in terms of empathy.

In the words of one business leader, “People don’t wake up wanting a mortgage. They wake up wanting a home.” Empathy means paying most attention to the latter, not the former.

Kantar Insights 2030 

Kantar’s report identifies three elements for companies to use in building a foundation of empathy: 

• Enriched resources: this means having access to the right data in order to understand the humans behind it; culture and context need to be included in customer databases. 
• Composite perspective: this is the ability to bring all the data together and spot patterns and learnings across data sources; a multi-source view of the customer can be built on critical data rather than catch-all datasets. 
• Human understanding: in which data analysis is infused with creative thinking to understand the human side of consumers and reach clear conclusions.

Key quote

“The success of your business must be built on a foundation of empathy, which means putting the human experience at the centre of everything a company does, not simply the customer” – J Walker Smith, chief knowledge officer/North America, Kantar.

Sourced from Kantar [Image: kantar.com]