How to Achieve Customer-Centricity in a Multichannel World?

Oh great. Akin is starting the umpteenth million blog. Just what everyone needed. More information! We can barely keep out all the marketing messages that are trying to reach us every day. The ads may seem like bloodhounds chasing after us wherever we go.  As consumers, we have to come up with increasingly smart devices to tune the irrelevant noise out, i.e. spam filters, TiVo, Caller ID, Do-not-call lists, or pay-for-no-adds. Yadda, yadda, nada.

As marketers though, the problem is ours too. Our tricky job is to implement customer-centric strategies so that we can fashion our communications so relevant that our prospects and customers will hear our voice despite all the noise. Our communications are supposed to seem like a service rather than a nuisance. So, instead of being big bad marketers, we are trying to be more like good sales people, as the Eisenberg brothers explain in their bestselling book “Waiting for Your Cat to Bark?”.
By that they mean that good sales people actually listen to their customers, aim to anticipate their needs and answer in a meaningful fashion. That is something that most marketers unfortunately rarely do, as the Eisenberg brothers brilliantly point out. This is something that marketers have to fix. Many of us genuinely want to fix this asap. But how can we listen to our customers given that their relationships with our companies span multiple channels? How can we be a good conversation partner to them unless we are able to pick up the conversation on one channel just where the conversation stopped on another channel?  In order for customer-centricity to be possible today we need to do our best to solve the multichannel marketing puzzle. Reconnecting the online with the offline is the required puzzle piece without which customer-centricity would have to depend on miracles.
This blog is meant as a meeting place for likeminded marketers to discuss that missing puzzle piece. Namely, metrics and methods for reconnecting the online and offline and enabling business success across channels.

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