Strengthen Today to Thrive Tomorrow

Have you ever wondered why Amazon is giving away benevolent cashback? Paying customers to make payments! just like a utopian bubble as it seems, the very fact is when Amazon Pay is the preferred transaction method, merchants are charged a nominal processing fee. a part of this fee is given as cashback to end users; thus, converting spending into earnings. 

Such innovative concepts are quickly and smoothly growing throughout industries to capture consumers. Thus, to future-proof their companies, every supplier and prosumer must reevaluate their current business strategies.

Time and again, the samples of Blockbuster, Nokia, Kodak, and lots more have been reiterated, highlighting their lack of agility that eventually led to their doom. But if it had been that simple, these businesses would also have recognized how important it was and been better equipped to modify their strategies to take advantage of changing market conditions. Therefore, it's crucial to consistently identify the constantly changing wants of consumers and provide appropriate solutions.

The customer was the king some time past, and so is now. What changed then? Instant gratification is today’s hottest trend, and if one isn't on board, it’s shortly before bankruptcy comes knocking on the door. This is often called being ‘au courant,’ and it's the tough first base. Therefore, the second and most practical base for an organization is to be customer-centric and agile.

Customer-centricity: Does it matter?

Let’s return to the earlier discourse on the companies that went bust and see for a fact if a customer-centric culture could have saved them. It's well-known that a customer-centric culture imparts a better understanding of customer needs, continuous feedback and engagement, the adoption of newer and relevant KPIs, and metrics, and eventually, revamping the customer experience.

Did Blockbuster et al. have a chance at survival? The glum answer is ‘yes.’ Focusing on customer-centric thinking periodically and creating a digital replica of the purchasers would help in achieving two key purposes:

• Understand the customer’s pain points and supply appropriate solutions, preferably before competitors, and
• Transcend pain spots and develop cutting-edge, inventive solutions to establish a brand's mental landscape.

How does agility solidify the framework?

Now that the customer-centric framework is planned, let’s anatomize a corporation and focus on its core pillars to understand if it’s agile enough to adapt swiftly and deliver value.

• Customers

Aligning an organization’s business priorities and methods with its customer's needs is of paramount importance. Through massive data capitalization and ongoing analytics use, a global IT leader and innovator of the subscription-based business model has demonstrated success in its transformation path and driven hyper-personalization for its clients. To create an individualized experience and meet the latent demands of millennial clients, proactive and ongoing customer segmentation using frameworks like STP, RFM, and other market segmentation matrices is helpful.

• Workforce

Needless to mention, the workforce of a corporation needs to be passionate and driven toward the overall goal. To be truly agile, the workers need to be adaptive and develop cross-functional skills. Their productivity and outcome must not be hindered by their environment, equipment, tools, or technologies. The work, workplace, and workforce are all elastic and hence have to be agile in the new normal. By designing the customer experience in such a way that it exceeds their expectations, one must lead customers into the "zone of loyalty."

• Processes

The secret to realizing the potential for a truly customer-centric future is to drive continual transformation. This involves relentless process reimagination to delight customers with revamped experience strategies and retain them for a foreseeable period. Additionally, by utilizing process mining tools, hidden inefficiencies can be addressed to produce better, automated, and transparent processes. The business processes of the future will be driven by data sovereignty and ambient intelligence, highlighting the necessity of integrating intelligent capabilities into the current operations.

• Technology

The technology environment of today must be reliable, low-code, no-code, on-cloud, based on microservices, and based on containerization. If any next-gen technology or web 3.0 is to take the world by storm, this may help to leverage it and get on the bandwagon as quickly as possible without getting disrupted. Technology trials with high computing power enable fail-fast, fail-safe, and fail better through rapid prototyping and faster learning. This successively will reduce technical debt.

• Management model

Organizations must have a data-driven and purpose-driven approach if they want to outpace their rivals and stay ahead of the curve. Building data literacy, democratizing data, and adopting newer technologies would undoubtedly position the info culture to continuously innovate and increase economic and societal value. The ‘now’ data-empowered employees warrant a transparent purpose that aligns with their values to keep them motivated and fulfilled.

If the main target is only on business as usual (BAU) today, there'll be no business tomorrow. The organisations of today must be strengthened with best practices, important trends, next-generation technology, and a strong agile framework in order to thrive tomorrow due to the shortening of the innovation lifecycle.