The saying “The customer is king” is widely known: the customer’s interests should be at the heart of every initiative, and service-oriented employees will even fulfill the occasional special request. At first glance, customer or user centricity seems to have always been the top priority. Nevertheless, in the course of digital transformation, more and more people are suddenly talking about the need to put a product’s users more at the center. What happened?
Who needs a second phone?
In most industries, we have been operating in saturated markets for some time. Almost everyone owns a smartphone. Market potential has largely been exhausted. At the same time, digitalization has made the world significantly more complex and uncertain. Companies can only outperform competitors by involving users early and continuously in product development. In the past, this is how Apple, for example, managed to become the most valuable brand in the world.
Users’ new (im)power
The key to business success in the digitalized world lies in understanding users or customers and their needs better than competitors do. The saying “The customer is king” is taken to the extreme by new technological possibilities. Some might add: “And the king is naked!” Whether we shop online, listen to music, watch movies, or write text messages: with every activity, we leave behind valuable data.
These activities can then be used to create behavioral patterns that make it easier for companies today to optimize every touchpoint with their brand. Marketing professionals now talk about entire journeys that customers embark on: customer journeys. Every touchpoint with the product should trigger positive emotions in users. Satisfied users act as multipliers through public reviews, ultimately further enhancing the brand’s reputation and thus its value.
Agile working as a competitive advantage
Agile companies put the user at the center by involving them in product development from the very beginning. From employees’ perspective, this also makes the question more important: “Why do we do what we do?” Try it out: Develop customer journeys for your customers. Which touchpoints have not been considered so far? Which previously unused data can be used to draw conclusions about unmet customer needs?
Cancel subscription – Why should I?
User centricity is reinforced by another trend: today, people are less interested in owning things. What they really want to pay for is being able to use products. Leading companies do not sell CDs or furniture. Instead, they sell access to music or even to interior design. The internet is changing the way people interact with companies and access products. Subscription-based business models, such as Spotify, work relentlessly to ensure that music lovers not only become customers, but above all remain subscribers and users.
At a glance
- In the course of digitalization, users have become even more important. Leading companies know their users inside out.
- User centricity does not only mean providing excellent customer service, but also delivering a great experience from the awareness phase, through the purchasing process, all the way to the post-purchase process.
- The customer journey is the complete sum of experiences customers have when interacting with your company and your brand. Instead of looking at only part of a transaction or experience, the customer journey documents the full experience of being a customer.
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