Marc de Swaan Arons and Marc Schroeder presented the Insights2020 findings in Amsterdam in October 2015. The study asks two questions: what the drivers of customer centricity are, and how to achieve it. Its answer is ten drivers grouped under total experience, customer obsession and the insights engine.
The presenters call it the largest and most global insights and analytics study ever conducted, covering 60 markets, 337 vision interviews and 10,495 survey respondents, with LinkedIn behavioral analysis, Wharton crowd sourcing and eight global research teams working across industries and functions.
Key findings
- The first three drivers make up total experience. Linking everything to a clear brand purpose runs 80 percent against 32 percent. Creating experiences based on data-driven insights runs 73 percent against 31 percent. Using insights and analytics to drive consistency across all touchpoints runs 64 percent against 29 percent.
- The customer obsession group shows the widest gaps. Customer centricity fully embraced by all functions runs 79 percent against 13 percent, and it is a top priority for leaders at 91 percent against 48 percent.
- Incentives lag intent even among over-performers. Only 45 percent base incentives on customer-related KPIs, against 24 percent of the others, and embracing risk and experimentation reaches only 40 percent against 13 percent.
- The insights engine group is about where analysis sits. Insights and analytics leading the business runs 51 percent against 18 percent, while reporting into the CEO reaches only 29 percent against 12 percent.
- The critical capabilities are business sense at 75 percent against 50 percent, whole-brain thinking at 71 percent against 42 percent, and storytelling at 61 percent against 37 percent.
Why the question was asked
The setup is the connected society. Connected devices grow from 7 billion in 2008 to 25 billion in 2015 and a projected 50 billion by 2020, alongside 212 billion sensor-enabled devices.
The presenters set that against four economic eras, from manufacturing through distribution and information to the age of the connected customer, and argue that traditional value drivers no longer provide competitive advantage.
The blunt version of the research question follows. Everybody talks about customer centricity, but does it drive business growth.
Opportunities and obstacles
The opportunities named are turning insights into action, behavioral data, brand purpose and personalization across all touchpoints, and the deck notes these hold especially for over-performers.
The challenges split by group. Internal silos and bureaucracy and the legacy of structure and functions weigh most on under-performers, while making sense of data and recruiting whole-brain people are named as the harder problems for over-performers.
What to do with it
The scorecard turns the ten drivers into a self-assessment, scoring each one against a benchmark and an ambition, with revenue growth potential attached. The deck labels those numbers illustrative.
Four shifts are put to the audience: from products and services to total experience, from detail of data to actionability of data, from managing risk to experimenting, and from delivering to customers to co-creating and innovating with them.
The data maturity path runs in five steps: know what data you have, link multiple data sources, integrate online and offline, offer data as a service to the customer, and become predictive and forward looking.
Scope and limitations
The scorecard figures shown in the deck are explicitly labeled illustrative rather than measured, and the driver percentages are presented as over-performer against under-performer contrasts without the base for each on the slide.
Source
This page summarises Driving Growth Through Insights and Purpose, by Marc de Swaan Arons, Marc Schroeder, October 13, 2015.