Overcoming Obstacles to Customer Centricity — Wharton’s Marketing Analytics program

This is Wharton’s Marketing Analytics program discussion 1.2 during week one’s module — Modern Marketing Science: Big Data, Better Data, and the Future of Firm Profits. In this module, we learned about how to use advanced marketing science for customer-centric profitability. Below are the questions and my thoughts on them.

Consider how you might help your organization become more customer-centric

• What might customer centricity look like in your organization?
• What obstacles might you face as you try to help your organization become more customer centric?
• What steps could you take to overcome these obstacles?

Customer-centricity in e-commerce company

In my previous organization, a small startup e-commerce company focusing on the smart home industry, customer-centricity would be the ability to identify the top 20% of customers and ensure the customers’ satisfaction with the product(s).

The lack of CRM

The biggest challenge facing the organization’s ability to become more customer-centric is the lack of a CRM system. In my experience, many small business owners are more prone to using product-centric approaches.

Small businesses tend to focus more on launching new products as a means of market expansion and as a result, distribution and partnerships seem to be more important than customer data management. As such, the only information received is the number of orders and sales; there is little information regarding customer demographics.

Photo by @blakewisz on Unsplash

Solutions: CRM & After-sales service

There are two directions to overcome the above obstacles: to build a CRM system and to collect customer data

1. CRM system: marketing team has to convince upper management that a CRM system is necessary. Since most organizations I used to work with are familiar with the product-centric approach, I have to provide more evidence that customer-centricity will benefit our future business growth.
2. Customer data collection: provide the incentives to motivate the e-commerce customers to register on the website. We need something more than shipping information to create comprehensive customer profiles. By offering extended after-sales service, VIP giveaways, or family discounts, it will be easier to collect further customer information that benefits customer-centric strategies.