According to a recent research by the CMO Council, a new measure of marketing performance, called customer affinity, looks beyond classical brand metrics to support marketing in its critical role of building customer-centric businesses.
Why is customer affinity such a critical concept? It is clear that soft metrics, such as brand awareness and satisfaction, do not adequately address the forces and factors that shape the customer's intention and desire to do business with a particular company or brand. Levels of competency, caliber of service and support, customer commitment, demonstrated quality of thinking, and consistency and quality of communications are factors that matter much more.
Customer affinity is more meaningful than customer satisfaction, loyalty or advocacy. Customer affinity goes beyond current, top of mind perceptions; it looks into the depth, breadth, and importance of the customer-vendor relationship to determine its capacity for sustainability, strategic value and trusted, long-term engagement. Customer affinity is perhaps the most powerful and substantive issue for vendors, channel partners and customers alike. In today's fast-changing and disruptive markets, superior customer interaction may be the most essential competitive advantage.
Customer affinity includes awareness, trust and credibility, and goes beyond to include other critical aspects of the customer relationship such as customer knowledge, product relevance, value-added services, co-innovation, responsiveness, business practices and policies, problem resolution, value of customer interactions and communications quality and consistency.
Marketers need to play a significant role in defining, orchestrating and activating all of the factors impacting customer affinity. Rather than relying on sales to engage with customers, marketers need to take the lead in strengthening their organizations' knowledge of the customer, and they must use this information and insight to make substantive changes to every interaction, customer-facing function and process in the organization. It is only through these customer-focused efforts that marketers can drive measurable improvements in ROI, volume and value of leads, selling cycles and customer retention and long-term referral.
In order to successfully Initiate a long-term affinity relationship, marketers must acknowledge that the sale is not an end in itself, but ideally, the first major milestone in a long-term, profitable and mutually productive relationship. A vendor must continually live up to customer expectations. The consensus is that too many companies forego potential profits by continuing to focus on closing the product sale, rather than on building organic, long-term affinity and value.
Customers say the most important characteristic of customer-centric companies is alignment around the customer's priorities and needs. It is then clear that inviting customers into the process of conceiving, developing and releasing products and services is fundamental to building customer affinity.
1 comment:
Great work.
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