I had the opportunity to attend the Siebel Marketing and Loyalty roadmap session today at Oracle OpenWorld, and Melissa Boxer, vice president of product marketing for those products, outlined the four basic principles to customer centricity:
1) Understand your customers: know who they are and how their behavior is changing.What are your customers' preferences -- where and how do they buy, what do they like or don't like?
2) Reward, recognize, and differentiate: Once you have a rich repository of customer data, leverage the insight gleaned to recognize differences in customers and their behaviors and think beyond basic loyalty points. Really think about what's meaningful to your customers to deliver a personalized, differentiated experience via every channel and interaction.
3) Engage across channels with relevant interactions: Customers aren't listening to traditional marketing. They are looking for rich dialogues with you -- and you need to be able to do that through any channel.
4) Build powerful communities of loyal customers: by doing so, you will build brand affinity and value for customers.
By following through on all these, you will build not just loyal customers, but as Denis Pombriant pointed out in an earlier session, you will create a core foundation of customer advocacy which should be a mission critical strategy for any organization.
