How to Balance Growth and a Customer Centric Culture

How to Balance Growth and a Customer Centric Culture
At IReC 2022, Vasanth Kumar, Sr Advisor, Samara Capital, talked about how businesses can drive growth while ensuring they are customer centric.

By Vaishnavi gupta , Sr Correspondent

29 Jun 2022 | 10 min read

Typically, any global companies or Indian companies that are leaders always drive customer centricity and deliver growth. It is true in both the B2B scenario, where business-to-business growth happens, and the B2C scenario, where businesses drive consumers. One cannot build great businesses if both are not managed well.

At IReC (Industry of Retail and E-commerce summit) 2022, Vasanth Kumar, Sr Advisor, Samara Capital, talked about how businesses can drive growth while ensuring they are customer-centric.

“For one to be customer-centric at the same time delivering growth, there are three important connect that the organization has to ensure it is built in its DNA – Human Connect, Commercial Imagination, and Committing Resources,” he said.

He explains all these connections in detail:

Human Connect

Nobody buys a tool standalone; there is always a human-to-human connection with which the company’s decision-maker trusts his external partner for delivering the business outcome. Hence, human connection is paramount for a company to build its customer-centricity. The company and its employees should deeply integrate with the customer.

As a customer-centric organization, companies should first embed themselves with a customer, understand what their real problems are, discover what the long-term solutions are, and help them. In this way, the companies will be able to build trust and next time, consumers will come up with the challenges on an ongoing basis with which they can build the relationship in a strong way. There's always a difference between solving a problem and helping business outcomes. Solving a problem is only temporary as the manager may change, the context may change, and therefore, the problems will again erupt. Instead, if you focus on the business outcome, then you will be able to give a permanent or long-term solution for anything. That's what this human connection is all about.

For instance, a customer who had very complex to and fro happening inside the organization for various activities; he/she wanted a method wherein that can be organized. Hence, the technology team ensured that the structure of the platform remained. They enabled through their platform a WhatsApp facility, wherein the customer can with the employees across geography on a one-to-one basis and have it trail visual files, record keeping, audit, everything was available on a structured process without hampering the process. Through this, the customer's problem got solved, not short term, but long term.

Commercial Imagination

The other dimension of customer-centricity is commercial imagination. There is no point in doing any local solution as you will end up being a service provider. And a tech company cannot become a service provider because that's not scalable. The solution is to have commercial imagination applied to the problems which the customer wants you to solve. And that happens only when you have an integrated organization where both the front-end employees and the backend employees think through what is required to solve their customer's problem in the long run. At the same time, it should be commercially viable for the platform to administrate it. As you know developments are not cheap, there's a lot of investment that goes into the R&D and if that is not distributed over a larger base, then very soon the company will not be able to afford to continue the innovation. So it's important to have a scalable solution and always do solutions that are future-proof.

For instance, a cash and carry retailer wants a customized dashboard to get brands to pay for certain shelf displays. Now, instead of focusing on developing a solution only for that, you go into the details on what is the requirement. The requirement is that in a situation where there are hundreds and thousands of SKUs, the customer wanted a certain narrowed view of certain SKUs. Now that concept can be taken into a larger perspective wherein this tool can be developed, wherein you can go into a filter, you can filter any parameter, and develop your own report, which automatically can be ported into a PPT generator so that one stroke and the client's job is easy to locate which SKU needs attention. It can be done for various reasons - better visibility, improving stock turns, controlling the damages, etc. At the same time, this development can be leveraged across all formats, not just hypermarket format. Therefore, the commercial imagination was actually implemented as multiple use cases were developed and every retail format could use the same solution in its own way.

Many times the customer will ask for a certain problem to be solved, but it is only for that moment. Next week, the customer will come back and throw a new problem at the company. So it's important that the service provider understands the real need of the customer and solves the problem long-term. That is where the commercialization happens. Otherwise, what will happen is there'll be a lot of inefficiencies and short-term thinking which will drain resources.

Committing Resources

The third is once you lock in the right type of customer and also the right ecosystem, the company has to commit resources so that new innovations can happen. If you see global companies like Microsoft, Apple, and Google, all of them in some way or the other follow these principles and that's how they have become global brands.

Committing resources is very critical having built relationships with the key customers and having enough competencies in terms of commercial imagination. It is important to commit resources to grow because technology keeps moving faster, unless you keep innovating, you will get outdated. The mortality rate in retail and tech companies is very high - 9 out of 10 companies really don't make it in terms of their profitability as well as growth. So it's important that every tool should keep driving itself through a proper roadmap, built on insights, not on temporary solving of customer's problem. This happens only when there's a strong ecosystem that is able to develop it. One has to work with key customers who are having long-term growth with a strong CLV (customer lifetime value) and potentially develop strong bonds with them, develop strong bonds with brands, brand partners, and solution providers. For successful business outcomes, it is not restricted to a set of tools. It is subject to the whole ecosystem helping, wherein a good ecosystem is one that enables the client or the customer to succeed in the long run.

Another advantage of doing this is building skills. The organization is as good as its employees’ skill sets. By building a strong ecosystem, one should also build skills for the employees to be future-proof. At the same time, you should improve the skills of the customers also. This is one hallmark of a customer-centric organization, elevating a tool into a skill.

Typically, any global companies or Indian companies that are leaders always drive customer centricity and deliver growth. It is true in both the B2B scenario, where business-to-business growth happens, and the B2C scenario, where businesses drive consumers. One cannot build great businesses if both are not managed well.

At IReC (Industry of Retail and E-commerce summit) 2022, Vasanth Kumar, Sr Advisor, Samara Capital, talked about how businesses can drive growth while ensuring they are customer-centric.

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