media update’s Adam Wakefield spoke to Joe Fuster, global head of the Customer Experience Cloud at Oracle, about customer centricity and his address at the CEM Africa conference earlier this month.

Your address at the CEM Africa conference looked at how organisations are breaking down traditional silo structures to enable customer-centricity. What are traditional silos, and in your mind, what is customer centricity?

A traditional business is organised by functional areas generally centred on customers, orders, finance, procurement, production, and human resources. Each of these areas were traditionally designed and optimised from an inside-out or ‘company’ point of view.

Innovators and disruptors have turned the traditional model upside down and designed business processes from an outside-in or ‘customer’ point of view.

Customer centricity is a business strategy used to create a positive experience at all phases of a customer journey. Becoming customer-centric begins with the realisation that the customer journey is not linear and is not dictated by the company. The modern customer journey is made up of a series of “micro-moments”.

What organisational shift needs to take place to reach customer centricity?

The organisational shift that needs to take place to reach customer centricity is to first design business processes that are optimised from the customer point of view and then build the organisation to support the business process. Taking this approach often leads to companies realising they need to have multiple business models or channels to become customer-centric. 

How is AI changing the customer experience and how are companies leveraging AI to meet consumer demands in the age of data?

AI is changing customer experience by resetting our expectations. If Amazon, Netflix, and Spotify can suggest books or movies based on our purchase history, then why can’t all businesses personalise their offerings in the same fashion? In the age of data, AI is moving beyond traditional programmatic and predictive techniques to become adaptive in real-time. Leading AI requires three components working together:
  1. Data, such as demographic, behavioural, and psychographic; 
  2. Data science; and
  3. Compute at scale.
For those who are unaware, what is a touch point and how do you see touch points evolving from our current array of mobile, print, broadcast, outdoor, activations, and other marketing forms?

A touch point is defined as any way a consumer interacts with a business. When the interaction is live, person-to-person, it is classified as “assisted”. When the interaction is done via self-service, it is classified as “unassisted”. 

Both types of interactions occur via the phone, the retail store, office or branch, kiosks, websites, and apps, as well as in print, broadcast, activations, and other traditional marketing forms. As augmented reality and virtual reality technologies continue to evolve, there will be many new touchpoints based on ‘touch’ and on ‘gestures’.  

We will see an increasing number of voice and IoT combinations to enable us to “talk” to all kinds of devices to tell the device to turn-on, turn-off, check status, check schedules, diagnose a problem, order service, etc.

For more information, visit cloud.oracle.com.

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One sector that faces a challenging future in the changing world of customer centricity is retail. Read more in our article, Retail in flux: Dion Chang explores the future of shopping

* Image courtesy of Oracle