By M. Isi Eromosele

A customer focused retail enterprise understands the entire customer experience and delivers against it to build customer advocates. To transform their businesses, customer focused retailers should integrate six core capabilities into their business models.

Consumer Insight

Customer focused retailers must acquire a deep understanding of their core customers’ needs and wants and use these insights to develop a consumer-driven, outside-in approach to designing the customer experience.

Retailers that have this capability will know, for instance, who their top customers are and how profitable they are, what types of services they prefer, how their shopping needs vary by occasion and when and where they like to shop.

The key components of consumer insight include:

Shopper intelligence and feedback loop | Outside-in shopping experience design | Multidimensional segmentation | Targeted customer acquisition and retention | Innovative consumer research methods

Personalized Dialogs

Customer focused retailers must have the ability to deliver relevant and customized communications to their customers in near real-time across all channels and touch points.

With this capability, for example, a retailer is able to make customized recommendations at the point of sale (POS) to fill “gaps” in its customers’ shopping baskets based on past purchases.

The key competencies required to deliver personalized dialogs include:

Real-time, intelligent messaging | Value exchange and relevance | Voice of the customer | Segmented treatment | One-to-one relationships

Multichannel Execution

It is vital for customer focused retailers to coordinate and integrate all channels to support a consistent customer experience. With this capability, retailers can serve customers as a single brand, regardless of which touch points or channels customers use.

The critical components of multichannel execution include:

Anytime, anywhere shopping | Single view of the customer | Seamless interactions | Coherence across channels | Employee and customer cross-channel services | Cross-channel optimization

Customized Offers

To provide a meaningful shopping experience to their best customers, customer focused retailers must offer products and services that align with customers’ expectations and shopping occasions.

This capability is based on the systematic use of customer insights in all core value chain processes, from merchandising to store/channel operations to customer management.

The key components required to develop customized offers include:

Customized solutions | Localized assortment planning | Customer focused store strategies | Consumer-driven supply chain | Product innovation collaboration | Product and service personalization

Associate Commitment

Store associates are critical to an organization’s ability to achieve its desired vision for its customers. Customer focused retailers adopt strategies to sustain employee commitment, so that they are motivated to satisfy customers.

These strategies include hiring the right people, providing them with meaningful training and giving them the tools and information needed to focus on customers.

The key components to develop associate commitment include:

Agile sales team | Cognitive-based change management | Role alignment | Personal customer commitment | Knowledge management and continuous learning | Parallel interest and rewards

Organizational Alignment

In a customer focused retail enterprise, all areas of the company collaborate seamlessly in order to satisfy customer needs.

This capability also requires retailers to consider the addition of new roles in the organization, such as a Customer Advocate or a Customer Data Analyst who can represent the customer voice across the enterprise.

Organization alignment has the following components:

One mind, one company | Segment-influenced operating model | Executive and management alignment | Cross-functional collaboration | Customer leadership and alignment | Customer focused metrics

Becoming more customer - focused is a vital strategy for all retailers and the means for turning shoppers into advocates and creating a sustainable, differentiated advantage.

M. Isi Eromosele is the President | Chief Executive Officer | Executive Creative Director of Oseme Group - Oseme Creative | Oseme Consulting | Oseme Finance

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