When you consider the development of strategies for integrating customer centricity into the breadth of business applications in different business functions, one emerging analytical focal point is social media analytics. The concept typically encompasses a variety of types of analyses including text analysis and sentiment assessments that can help in organizing the content within the different contexts of selected social media channels. However, there is a more fundamental type of social network analysis with a much longer pedigree that seeks to identify connections among different actors within an environment, and is particularly suited to analyzing customer connectivity.
Customer connectivity embodies the idea that relationships exist between customers, among sets of customers, as well as among customers and other entities such as locations, products, etc., and those connections and relationships can provide advantage in the creation of value. There are archetypical roles relating to connectivity that exist within any community, and in fact a very accessible treatment of these roles is provided by Malcolm Gladwell in his book “The Tipping Point” (which if you haven’t yet read, now is a good time).
He uses three terms: Connector, Maven and Salesman. Connectors are those individuals who know many others and are comfortable and able to introduce one to another. Mavens are individuals with special knowledge about a particular topic and are willing to share that knowledge. Salesmen are individuals with skills at both persuasion and negotiation. The right environment and combination of individuals with these roles can trigger an “epidemic” or increase in uptake of any type of behavior.
In other words, it is valuable to understand the roles individuals play within a community along with the relationships among the individuals within that community. This provides an opportunity to analyze customer connectivity, seek out interesting relationships and patterns, and essentially model how social network structures and patterns influence customer behaviors. Once those patterns and structures are identified, you can strategically take advantage of the way customers are influenced within the network to create competitive advantage and increase corporate value.
1 Comment
I would add some additional thoughts to this important topic.
Organizations need to change their perspective from customer-centricity to relationship-centricity. Sometime in the middle of the 20th century, Peter Drucker famously said, "The purpose of a business is to create a customer." Although, some argue it was actually Theodore Levitt who said that or at least, I believe, he expanded it to "create and keep a customer."
Whoever said it, it is not true today. If anything, the purpose of a business is to create and keep a relationship...among persons, organizations and groups playing multiple roles, sometimes at the same time.
As David points out, it is important to "identify connections among different actors within an environment." This means we need to re-imagine "customer connectivity" as something else, because "customer" is too confining.
In fact, I would argue that customer is not an entity. The entity is a person, organization or group, which may be a customer, but also could be a supplier or partner or whatever else...all at the same time with totally different data relationships to boot. "Customer" is a role or persona like "employee," "supplier," or "partner," which are also commonly misidentified as entities and misused to describe data domains.
For example, I worked with a university where the "actors" were students, alumni, donors, suppliers, employees, contractors, and so on. In lots of instances, a person played multiple roles with different data and entity relationships based on their role. A student could also be an employee or even an alumni and supplier with different sets of data and relationships for each role.
In yet another example involving a health insurer, they have interactions and transactions with subscribers, members, providers (who may be persons or organizations), brokers, third-party administrators, households, partner insurers and, yes, customers, that specifically refer to employer organizations. Again, in many instances a person, organization or group may be, for example, both a provider and a customer or a subscriber and an employee with different sets of data and relationships.
For this reason, I increasingly see businesses seeking other terminology besides 'customer' in entity relationship and data modeling. In my recent experience, three organizations all used "constituent" to describe a person, organization and group. These constituents may have one or more roles and be a part of one or more "constituencies."
It is possible for much of the data, such as location and contact point(s), which we typically use to identify, say, a constituent will vary based on role or persona, but there is only one constituent. Organizations frequently seek a relationship with a person, organization and group in all their roles, but need to capture data about them based on their persona or role. Unfortunately, most enterprise systems cannot cope with this, because they support an outdated purpose of a business. --Peter Perera