MW: Is that because you’re not selling anything?

Marketing Week (MW): What are the challenges of putting the customer at the centre of operations and are brands changing quickly enough to keep up with consumer needs?

Nicholas Wright (NW): I wouldn’t say we’ve cracked it at Zurich but I think we’ve broken the back of it through our customer-centricity drive.

In financial services, channel conflicts (among online operations, branches and independent financial advisers) have always hindered the customer. But now I think we’ve tackled the problem at board level.

Our chief executive puts customer centricity as one of the four main pillars of Zurich’s strategy. But what is customer centricity? It was thought to be customer satisfaction but it’s not. It’s about understanding the customer and giving them relevant service, and allowing them to navigate our silos on their terms, not us imposing on them. That is what finally allowed us to take a more integrated approach.

MW: So how do you drive a customer-centric ethos successfully across multiple channels?

If you take a luxury Swiss brand, the parent company spends a lot of time and effort building reputation. Trying to marry that with some of the conversion requirements in ecommerce is quite hard work. Online, you want nice white space and not so many bells and whistles to push the consumer along. There’s a fundamental disjoint between that and the brand’s needs. These brands are finding it difficult understanding how to manage this space. We have to prove to them that luxury can be sold in this way.

MW: How can we bring different channels together to better ensure a seamless customer experience?

Ian Godbold (IG): There are those who think the internet might go away again, so don’t put too much effort into it. Or, if it is still around, it will have changed so much anyway. Their feeling is that you can’t keep up with it so wait until it settles down.

As a branded goods manufacturer, rather than a direct retailer, a lot of this is also cost efficiency. We sell a lot of aerosols. Something that costs £3 to sell to someone, taking into account the packaging, won’t make a profit online.

MW: For service industries, is it possible to make online operations more customer centric by bringing in real-time elements? We also have a lot of pick-ups from concert venues with multiple exits. We can inform customers which exit they should take to meet their driver quickly.

MW: Are the challenges of staying customer-centric online different for business-to-business brands? People also have very different roles to fulfil [in their companies] and they are coming to our website with those roles in mind. We’re not so good at understanding the full customer journey at every touchpoint and engaging them across every channel.

MW: Is that because you’re not selling anything?

SHD: We do have products; we’re selling The Carbon Trust product. But perhaps we don’t have the pressure of physical delivery. Yet we can do a better job because if we’re not engaging users, then we’re not getting them back, not getting their data and not understanding what their needs are.

Date: 2016-01-03; view: 801