By M. Isi Eromosele

The challenges of an increasingly price-driven world have raised the bar for retailers to create a shopping experience that builds loyalty to their brands, channels and services.

Retailers can develop brand advocates by becoming a customer focused enterprise and blending the customer perspective with a traditional product-centric approach.

This new approach will require retailers to build customer insights into their core business decisions such as merchandising, marketing, customer service, new product development, and store and channel operations to significantly change the day-to-day operations of their business.

At Oseme Creative, we believe that retailers that are customer focused achieve greater customer advocacy, retention and loyalty, capture increased share of wallet and market share, develop deeper customer trust and demonstrate superior financial results.

The Customer Focused Enterprise

There are several factors in today’s global retail marketplace that are driving the need for differentiation and customer focus. Retail market fragmentation and complexity are increasing, while boundaries between traditional segments continue to blur.

To be more successful in this ever-changing marketplace, successful retailers are placing customers at the center of their strategies and operations and becoming truly customer focused.

To be truly customer focused, retailers need to embody the following characteristics in their business operations:

• Deep understanding of the needs, shopping preferences and expectations of their best customers across all channels, touch points, products and services
• High priority placed on using customer insights to drive decisions in merchandising, pricing and promotions, customer service, as well as marketing and communications
• Consideration given to both the emotive aspect of the shopping experience or how their customers feel about shopping with them and how they want to interact with them, and the tactile performance or how their customers use their products or services
• Prioritization of investments based on criteria that define a successful shopping experience for their best customers

Becoming customer focused requires a shift in how retailers think about and organize their businesses. It is about bringing together an inside-out, operational view with an outside-in, customer view to deliver a superior shopping experience.

By balancing internal objectives with customer objectives, retailers can bridge the gap between what the customer experiences and how the company operates. The starting point for this transformation is leveraging customer data across the company.

Aligning Consumer Insights With Customer View

As retailers combine inside and outside perspectives, incorporating consumer insights

into decision making across all core business processes is essential.

Often times, retailers capture significant amounts of customer data, but it gets trapped in Marketing and is not leveraged across the company.

When insights are aligned with customer-facing processes, retailers can transform their businesses in the following ways:

• The focus on the shopping experience becomes channel, lifestyle and segment based.
• Merchandise selection includes category, segment and local market needs and assortment decisions are based on optimizing the baskets of core customers
• Marketing becomes less mass-market-driven and more personalized by segment
• Organizational metrics include both product performance and customer satisfaction

This alignment helps retailers build more satisfying shopping experiences and develop more customer advocates. For example, when marketing plans are tailored to specific customer segments based on shopping basket analysis, customers are happier to see monthly mailers in their mail box because they discover promotions they can directly use.

Greater customer focus helps drive greater value across the enterprise through improved revenues, as well as margin and asset utilization.

This value can be realized by adopting a set of customer strategies with clearly identified metrics, which can then be tied to measurable results and bottom-line business impact.

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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