Customer-Centric Retail Model is Key

Have you had a chance to check out the recent Retail Customer Experience article regarding the need to develop and sustain a customer-centric focus -- regardless of your industry?

CPS' Social Media Wall:
Engaging and understanding customers

Author Micah Friedman, with Cognizant, suggests developing new business and operating models to better deliver on customer needs and desires.

Businesses aren't silos any longer (if they ever were). Rental car companies, as an example, need to consider themselves as being in the transportation business and recognize the validity of competition from Uber, Lyft, SmartCar and others that aren't traditional rental car competitors.

What's critical, Friedman suggests, is considering multiple ways of engaging customers with a richer, customizable and frictionless experience.

One focus point is optimizing Social Media. Here's an opportunity to understand customers better (by evaluating their tweets and posts, for example) as well as providing a mechanism to shape how customers perceive them and their offerings.

Take at look at CPS' Social Media Wall in a new master plan community information center.  It's visually welcoming and designed to engage visitors from the moment they walk in -- delivering traditional marketing copy and community images side-by-side with consumer generated content.  Have a special event planned? Assign a unique hashtag, start posting information about the event and, at the event, ask attendees to submit pictures and comments.  Result: a shared,  creative process fostering an ongoing conversation!