Customer Obsession: A Key to Incredible Customer Experience.

There is only one boss, the customer, and he can fire everybody in the company from the chairman on down, simply by spending his money somewhere else." -Sam Walton

This famous quote by Sam Walton summarizes the threat which keeps the marketers always on their toes. Not only do the customers have more choices about the products or services, but they have more information available about these choices. If you look at any successful organization, it will surely have customer focus at one of its core values and rightly so. 

After all, the customers are the reason for which the company exists. But over the years many successful organizations have realized that just having the customer focus is not enough and customer obsession is the way forward if they want to survive in the long run. 

Customer obsession means constantly listening to customers, and then continuously testing, enhancing, and personalizing the customer experience. Customer focus talks about understanding customers' current wants and needs whereas customer obsession aims at inventing and delivering on unanticipated future needs. In customer focus the marketer is having a focus on customer satisfaction, whereas, in customer obsession the marketer aspires to long term customer delight. 

Organizations having a customer focus think about providing better products than the competition but organizations who are customer obsessed, pioneer new frontiers with less competition. According to Gibson Biddle, former VP at Netflix, customer obsession means a healthy preoccupation with customers' unanticipated, future needs through a mix of research techniques that put the customer in the center of everything you do, so that you begin to see the product through their eyes.

According to Oren Kaniel of Appflyer, customer obsession means to continue being unbiased and independent and place our customers' at the forefront of every decision we make. Customer obsessed businesses like Amazon and Netflix have transformed whole industries. They are mostly driven by the desire to learn from the customers and not just to listen to them. Rather than simply understanding the current wants of their customers, these organizations began to deliver the unanticipated future needs. They haven't just created new products but they have set new expectations for others to follow and in doing so they have created larger margins that are more sustainable over time. According to a blog written in salesforce.com, businesses that do not put the customer first will struggle for relevance in an increasingly competitive market.

Until a decade ago the goals of CRM adoption focused on optimizing and automating business processes and with the help of tools like these, organizations focused upon "managing" their customers. But the customers today enjoy greater exposure, information and knowledge and are not inanimate objects that are to be managed. They are active, savvy and like to engage with the marketers for a better experience. They want the marketers to anticipate their needs and create meaningful interactions with them which can give them a unique, personalized experience and if they don't get this, they will not hesitate to take their business elsewhere.

Customer obsession helps the organizations in doing much more than building better customer experiences. In fact it can help in re-imagining the whole business. The way Amazon has re-invented retail is a prime example of its customer obsession. Amazon's core competency is not category but its obsession with its customers and what they could possibly want has allowed it to enter and disrupt categories. Needless to say that it has created a new type of customer experience.

Developing a customer obsessed culture is not an easy task. Successful organizations who have mastered this art enjoy the kind of customer loyalty which is a dream for every marketer. To stay competitive in the business, the companies need to first understand the true meaning of customer obsession. They need to adopt the customer obsessed thinking and this not only requires an acceptance by the leadership but most importantly the employees, who are supposed to execute the customer centric vision of the business, need to be empowered. Without an internal transformation the goal of building a customer obsessed culture cannot be achieved.