Customers are more demanding than ever. Accustomed to the convenience of online commerce during lockdown, they’re now expecting digital channels to provide a smoother and efficient customer experience.
Digitally transformed companies can gain a vital edge by meeting the customer where they are. By taking an ‘outside-in’ perspective, they scan the marketplace, pick out their desired customer segments, and organize the entire organization around the customer.
This requires a complete commitment to digital, encompassing direct-to-consumer delivery, data analytics, and a convergence of the front office including marketing, sales, service and commerce.
For these organizations, COVID-19 has provided a chance to really shine and can even lower costs to serve. The top-ranked brands in KPMG’s 2020 Customer Experience Excellence Report typically outperform their peers — in terms of customer experience ratings — by between 10-12 percent.
We heard a similar story from leaders surveyed in a recent KPMG-commissioned study conducted by Forrester Consulting. They say their organizations’ top digital transformation drivers are largely customer focused — with an emphasis on improving customer experience, creating customer centric digital commerce, and picking up market signals swiftly to respond to changing tastes and purchasing behavior.
Source: A commissioned study conducted by Forrester Consulting on behalf of KPMG, July 2020
Customer-centricity has become an ever bigger priority
- 80% say their customer-centric strategy was a ‘high’ or ‘top’ priority prior to the pandemic
- 72% say customer centricity is a higher priority since COVID-19
COVID-19 is also increasing CEOs’ desires to go digital
These findings resonate with the views of CEOs, as expressed in KPMG’s 2020 Global CEO Outlook. Respondents to this survey feel the pandemic has accelerated the need to create a seamless digital customer experience and create new digital business models and revenue streams.
- 79% are accelerating the creation of a seamless digital customer experience
- 64% are accelerating new digital business models and revenue streams.
Source: A commissioned study conducted by Forrester Consulting on behalf of KPMG, July 2020
Base: 780 professionals involved with digital transformation strategy decisions
Source: A commissioned study conducted by Forrester Consulting on behalf of KPMG, July 2020
Discover more
For most companies, changes in the front office will lead the journey to customer-centricity. It’s here, after all, that the enterprise meets the marketplace and the customer. To embrace a new front-office structure, marketing, sales and service executives need to address the six must-haves of a digital organization: data, analytics, automation, organizational structure, metrics and culture.
At KPMG, we understand that digital disruption and rising customer expectations are creating unforgiving markets where loyalty is hard won and easily lost. If you can’t deliver what your customers want, when and where they want it, they will go to someone who can. But there’s no point in creating a breakthrough customer experience if the new business model runs at a loss. We can help you get closer to your customers – and stay there.
