Consumer Packaged Goods (CPG) companies are seeing the end of traditional business models that link manufacturers with retailers and consumers.

Retailers worldwide are facing threats to their very survival—from eroding margins and declining market share to digitally adept consumers who expect a great customer experience with every interaction.

To succeed in this volatile environment, Consumer and Retail companies need a holistic, enterprise-wide, “outside-in” approach that connects their front, middle and back offices. Aligning to the customer’s agenda is paramount.

Insurance:

As a non-life insurer, do all relevant parts of your organization that affect customer experience, directly or indirectly, understand and act in accordance with your identified customer agenda?

To succeed in winning the loyalty of 21st century customers, insurers need an enterprise-wide approach that connects the capabilities of the front, middle and back offices — so as to appropriately focus on its customer agenda.

Power and Utilities:

Utilities ensure there is a reliable source of power. They respond quickly to outages and provide easy-to-understand bills. These services have always been at the core of market expectations for utilities. But today’s customers are more empowered, conscious, demanding and connected than ever before. They certainly want more from a utility than just ‘keeping the lights on’. High-performing utilities recognize the need for connection and transformation. They understand that, by connecting the front, middle and back offices they can execute the customer growth agenda.

Retail Banking:

Today’s retail banks are delivering banking apps to check balances and pay bills anywhere, anytime, credit cards applications with real-time approvals and instant access to credit. As a result, they have increased the number of customer touchpoints by 1000% over the last two decades.

But as the number of customer interactions continue to increase, bank executives have realized the number of sales opportunities has decreased. They have also realized as the number of customer interactions increase, the number of channels requiring service has remained flat. They have added phone apps, but customers still need ATMs; they have added mobile deposits but customers still need branches. The promise of reducing channel costs because of the addition of digital channels has not been realized.

To compete more effectively, capture the value inherent to the digital channels, and reduce the cost to serve in the traditional channels, banks must organize themselves to become customer-centric.

Telecoms:

Telecommunications companies (Telcos) have had to evolve their business models beyond phone and connectivity to fend of competitive pressures and meet increasing customer demand for more diverse products and services.

As a result, Telcos have expanded into new services and offered new devices and tools in the hope of winning, serving and retaining customers. Telcos have stepped out of their comfort zone, launching dedicated websites, apps and tools via a broad range of devices like PCs, smartphones, TVs and wearables — all in an effort to improve and expand customer interactions.

However, Telco executives are recognizing that the multiband cross-channel tactics widely in use today — under the guise of “omnichannel” — fail to yield financial and business opportunities across the enterprise value chain.