customer centricity axisof high performance may2008

Customer Centricity

The New Axis of High Performance

Customer Centricity

Customer Relationship Management 3

1 The Customer Service Dilemma: Balancing Cost and Quality. Accenture White Paper. 2006.

Customer Centricity

The New Axis of High Performance

Focusing on the new consumerToday’s customers seem to think the world revolves around them—and they are right.

The global economy has entered a new and complex phase, as the contours of the commercial landscape are reshaped by unprecedented levels of competition, eroding customer loyalty and the quickened pace of innovation. Together, these forces have triggered a seismic shift in the balance of power between providers and their customers.

This is good news for organizations that see the opportunity amid the change and align themselves quickly and effectively around a new focal point: delivering a customer-centric expe-rience—profitably and consistently—designed end-to-end around customer perspectives and intentions. Accenture’s High Performance Business research

has shown, in fact, that designing the right customer experience and delivering it the right way leads to better financial performance, stronger brand value and improved customer loyalty.1

Make no mistake, however: achieving and sustaining customer centricity is a challenging proposition which grows more challenging every day. Around the world, consumer expectations are rising quickly, and their perceptions are defined through an increasingly complex set of interactions. Moreover, new consumer populations are emerging with distinct needs and preferences of their own.

With so much changing, few organizations are fortunate enough to maintain a deep understanding of what customers want and a clear view of what they really experience—or the ability to keep experience aligned with expectation. An airline, for example, may claim success when it gets a

customer to her destination on time at a competitive price, but if it loses the bag she needs for a critical meeting, it still stands to lose her business permanently.

To weather the economic and cultural transformations now underway and achieve high performance, organizations must refocus the entire experience they provide around the desires and intentions of their target customers—from the first impressions created by marketing and sales to the day-to-day experience of using a product from its initial purchase until it is upgraded or replaced. They must also achieve this level of customer-centricity with the speed, flexibility and certainty demanded by their market. To make this change, they will need insight, leadership and commitment to excellence—a challenging journey, to be sure, but one that must be made.

4 Customer Centricity—The New Axis of High Performance

2 Estimate adjusted for purchasing power differences.

Consumerism 1.

Commoditization2. More options, lower prices•Customer portability•Product ubiquity•Shorter lifecycles for innovation •

Convergence3. Industry and channel blurring•(Retailization)•Category expansion/bundling•Extended industry networks •

Saturation4. Over-stored/overcapacity•Liberalization (Europe and •

Free Trade)Virtualization (Internet)•

Drivers of Change

Product-centric competition

Seller-drivemarket

Customer-centricdifferentiation

Buyer-drivenmarket

Organizations must respond to the forces reshaping the global economy—or risk becoming irrelevant and, ultimately, obsolete.

Why customers are the new focusFor most enterprises, growth comes from developing new customer or market segments, bringing new products and services to market, or driving more value from current customer relationships.

The challenge at the center of all these growth strategies is their volatile target: today’s customer—more elusive, more demanding and more diverse than ever. Even with providers working harder to win their favor, customers seem only to find more to dissatisfy them, from shoddy toys to stale vegetables, while finding little dissuade them from defecting to competitors. Buyers today tend to categorize providers into polar extremes—the “distinctive” and “everyone else.” Earning a place in the distinctive category has become far more difficult and costly.

For one, consumers know more—and their knowledge is power. Detailed

product information and the opinions of other buyers are easily available, courtesy of the networked world.

Accelerating product life cycles pose another challenge. The rapid pace of innovation means competitive advantage is increasingly short-lived, forcing providers to improve the impact and velocity of innovation and increasing the damage they incur when a launch backfires or a product fails.

Increasingly, enterprises must also consider a changing consumer base, often including entirely new buyer segments. The demographics of mature economies are evolving, and companies must respond to changing buyer needs and values. Also, emerging economies are becoming important consumer markets in their own right, expected to account for more than half of global consumption by 20252. These “new” consumers have distinct characteristics and may regard foreign brands with uncertainty or doubt. Understanding and appealing to buyers in these

markets will require new insights and new approaches to marketing, sales and customer service.

Another factor helping to tip the balance of power away from companies is their own success. While learning to satisfy latent customer demand—for speed, efficiency, convenience—organizations also taught their customers to expect more from all providers. Consider how overnight delivery became the new normal in the courier business, or how the ubiquity of online banking has compelled other providers to offer around-the-clock service channels. Hotels with check-in lobby kiosks, for example, help late arrivals reach their rooms faster. They also lead guests to expect all hotels to offer the same experience.

Customers have even come to expect every provider to meet the service standards set by other industries. Few


Designing and consistently executing a customer experience designed around customer intentions and preferences helps organizations respond to market changes in ways that strengthen their brand, reinforce customer loyalty and support profitable growth.

Differentiation

Product and experience define a combination that stands out for target customers

Loyalty

Competitive moat created around customers, who become less sensitive to price and focus on total value and convenience

Profitable growth

Minimize impact of "me—too" price and promotions

Entry to new markets/segments profitably

Differentiated customer experience

consumers use multiple cell phones from multiple wireless companies, for example—but they do interact with airlines, banks and a host of other providers, and how they are treated by these organizations in these industries influences how they expect to be treated by their wireless phone company—and their grocer, cable company, government institutions and so forth.

Delivering the differentiated customer experience In short, today’s customers demand an exceptional experience in return for their business and loyalty. Being merely adequate is no longer adequate.

According to Accenture research,3 a poor customer experience is the most-often cited reason for customer flight. Our research also indicates that fully half of all consumers leave a product or service provider at least once every 12 months because of an unsatisfactory

experience. Even when customers view their experiences as fair or good, they are quick to leave—as switching costs decline, even the most revered corporate brands are vulnerable. Conversely, consumers identify a differentiated experience as the chief reason for choosing a new provider. To address these myriad challenges to growth, successful businesses will transform their strategies, workforces and operations to be increasingly customer-centric. By refocusing on delivering an experience designed to satisfy the intentions and preferences of target customers—through their marketing, sales and customer service functions—they will produce significant, sustainable impact on performance.

Differentiation. They will offer a combination of product and brand experience that stands out for target customers.

Loyalty. They will create a competitive moat around customer relationships; buyers become less sensitive to price and focus on total value and convenience.

Profitable growth. They will minimize the impact of “me-too” price and promotions, and make entry to new, high-growth markets and customer segments more profitable and less risky.

In short, delivering a differentiated customer experience is the cornerstone of cost management, customer satisfaction and profitable growth. While many organizations already understand and even embrace this concept, many also struggle to execute the customer-centric agenda successfully.

Translating strategic objectives into sustainable results is what separates the merely interested from the leaders. Organizations striving to become high-performance businesses will replace the traditional focus on customer relationship management with a focus on customer experience management. Like star

3 Customer Satisfaction in the Changing Global Economy: Satisfying new requirements for high performance. Accenture 2007 Global Customer Satisfaction Survey. 2007.


Accenture believes that true customer centricity is founded on three core principles: customer relevance, enterprise agility and excellence in execution.

Enterprise agility Companies foster the organizational agility required to effectively execute customer relevance.

Customer relevance Market leaders convert advanced customer insight into value through products, services, experience and marketing.

Execution excellence High performers implement people and business processes and technology capabilities to deliver a tailored customer experience.

athletes who change the momentum of the game with a curve ball, a bit of backspin or a sudden pivot on the playing field, they will shift away from the old transactional view of customer interactions, concentrating instead on the accumulative impact of every experi-ence—across channels and over time.

Becoming customer centricBecoming truly customer centric requires something other than more investment in sales training, advertising campaigns or call center technologies. Indeed, companies that have embarked solely on implementing CRM solutions have seldom become customer centric because the other dimensions of their customers’ experiences have not changed.

Accenture defines customer centricity as incorporating the customer’s perspectives, values and actions into the business and operations strategy,

capability development and execution—to improve business performance and build customer loyalty. Organizations may transform at different speeds, but transformation is the ultimate goal.

To center on today’s customer—more knowledgeable, demanding and empowered—high-performance businesses embrace three principles.

Customer relevance. High performers convert advanced customer insight into value through products, services, experience and marketing.

Execution excellence. High performers organize and enable their people and create processes and technological capabilities that enable them to deliver a tailored and consistent customer experience.

Enterprise agility. High performers foster the organizational agility required to effectively value, execute and sustain customer relevance.

All three tenets must have the wholehearted support of the senior management team, and they must be combined in a concerted and holistic approach that revolves around the entire customer experience and which crosses many functional areas.

Accenture has identified five imperatives for achieving customer-centric benefits— an integrated set of new and adapted business capabilities designed and executed to provide differentiated value for target customer segments.

Becoming customer relevant. Customer-centric organizations rely on segmentation strategies that replace the academic with the actionable: predictive, recognizable and executable customer insight.

Delivering the differentiated customer experience. Customer centricity depends on a new level of alignment and integration across customer-facing operations, including marketing, sales, customer service and supply chain operations.


Where Does Your Organization Stand on the High-Performance Axis? Organizations can approach customer centricity in different ways and move at different speeds across the transformation spectrum—ranging from tactical improvements in individual business units to cross-enterprise initiatives. Every path toward customer centricity, however, should be mapped according to the issues that matter most.

•Howareyourespondingtothebuyer-drivenmarket?

•Howwelldoyouknowyourcustomers?

•Justhowloyalareyourcustomers?

•Isyourcustomerexperiencedifferentiatingordiluting?

•Howareyourbrandandyourexperience(stores,products,metrics)tailoredaroundtheworld?

•Whoinyourorganizationhasaccountabilityforthecustomerexperienceacrossfragmentedorganizations?

•Doyousimplyoffermultiplechannels,orisyourcustomerexperiencetrulymultichannel?

•Howdoyourcustomersparticipateinandowntheinnovationprocess?

•Doyouknowwheretoplaceyourbetoncustomercentricity:onimportantprojectsoronastrategicprogram?


Accenture Marketing TransformationSociete Nationale des Chemins de Fer Francais (SNCF)—the French state-owned railway company— is one of the key players in Europe's vast and sophisticated land transporta-tion network. With Accenture's help, SNCF has developed a dedicated capability to build loyalty and create marketing campaigns for its most valued customers. According to CRMServices' CEO, Sylvie Latour: "Our new subsidiary, CRMServices, provides a critical link between loyalty and marketing, and it is on track not only to help SNCF generate significant savings, but also to reach three to five million customers through targeted promotions. The support of the Accenture team enabled us to focus on customer marketing and strategy and better target our key clients while optimizing pricing."

4 Russell 3000 Index analysis. Stuart. May 2003.5 Unravelling Complexity in Products and Services. Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania and The George Group. March 2006.

Managing the workforce ecosystem. Customer-centric organizations recognize that the workforce influencing the customer experience is wider in today’s networked world and is actually an ecosystem of channel partners and other third parties.

Customer-centric performance management. Organizations that put the customer at the center of business strategy and operations also manage their business in a customer-centric way, realigning metrics, scorecards and management practices to deliver new customer outcomes.

Customer-engaged innovation. A truly customer-centric organization involves the customer in shaping the customer experience.

The new physics of marketing, sales and customer serviceTransforming marketing

With account-based marketing now an established practice and concepts such as “one-to-one marketing” part of the marketing lexicon, marketers could be forgiven for thinking they have mastered customer centricity.

In reality, however, the complexities of customer-centric marketing have confounded most efforts to understand deeply what customers want today—let alone anticipate what they may want tomorrow. Moreover, the average tenure of the chief marketing officer (CMO) at a leading company is only 1.9 years—leaving a very narrow window for achieving growth and innovation targets.4

Accenture helps senior marketing executives quickly gather the insights, tools and processes they need to create competitive advantage in both mature and emerging markets. We focus on building highly differentiated value propo-sitions for each target customer segment, on executing these strategies at speed and on continuously refining marketing strategies and messages. The result: more relevant and more consistent customer experiences that drive profitable growth by helping to ensure more effective customer acquisition and retention.

Accelerating growth

In a recent study, 23 percent of orga-nizations reported that the numbers of products and services they offer have more than doubled in the last five years.5 Clearly, the intricacies of the marketing mix can make it seem impossible for customer centricity to be a reality for more than a handful of premium customers.

Accenture Sales TransformationIn a globalized marketplace where consumer electronic goods are rapidly becoming commoditized, Canon needed to differentiate itself, and the value it provides, in the eyes of consumers and retailers. With Accenture's help the electronics company transformed its sales function by identifying the core roles required within the sales force, and then devising a curriculum to train employees for those roles. The training is now carried out within a newly established Sales Academy and has been responsible for improved skills and behaviors amongst the sales staff, as well as higher-than-average customer satisfaction levels. The company is now well on its way to achieving high performance in sales.


Precedents and Questions

1543: Nicolaus Copernicus overturns the prevailing conception of the universe by identifying the "true" center of the solar system.

Does your business have the flexibility to stay centered on what matters most to customers, as their expectations change?

Consider Samsung Electronics: With 14 product categories across 200 countries, Samsung’s marketing executives manage a complex matrix of customer-centricity options. At companiessuchasJohnson&Johnson,marketers must optimize marketing investments across 180 categories in 250 countries: 45,000 category-country combinations. Then, factor in other dimensions such as product proliferation, market segment, channel and media and the complexity of the challenge becomes staggering.

Executives understand the magnitude of the task facing them. Accenture has found that more than 60 percent of cheif marketing officers believe their companies are good at developing growth initiatives; 41 percent say they have a strong ability to plan end-to-end implementation of these initiatives; and just 30 percent feel they have the ability to execute quickly and stay ahead of the competition.6

Nevertheless, leading marketers are making progress with customer centricity. A few years ago, Best Buy segmented its customers and crafted specific value propositions for each segment, achieving strong economic results that have been widely acknowl-edged in the business press. Campbell Soup—which has long dominated the condensed soup market—has also used smart customer segmentation to drive growth.7 By systematically investi-gating the articulated and unarticu-lated needs of its consumer base, the company has been able to reinvent itself—and its market—by introducing a new generation of product categories designed for the needs of a new generation of consumers.

To match these results, companies must first understand where and how to invest their marketing resources for the best return. Accenture helps organizations accelerate growth by

enabling them to quickly develop, implement and manage fact-based marketing strategies. Specifically, we leverage customer centricity by generating a consistent branded customer experience across new and existing target customer touchpoints. We further accelerate growth by pinpointing the new market, product and services propositions required to win new customers and develop new market spaces.

1687: Isaac Newton formulates three laws governing the movement of objects, including the rule that for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction.

Can you execute new customer strategies with certainty of the results?

1920s: Edwin Hubble uses Einstein's theory of general relativity to prove that the edges of the universe are expanding. In the year 2000, astronomers discover that the universe is, in addition to expanding, accelerating.

Does your organiza-tion have the ability to adapt to changing economic forces, at the pace the market demands?

6 Innovation and Profitable Growth. Accenture and the Economist Intelligence Unit. March 2006.7CarlJohnsonandHenryRak,“ReframingtheMarket to Achieve Transformation Growth,” Grocery Manufacturers of America Forum, Winter 2005.


8 Customer Satisfaction in the Changing Global Economy, Accenture 2007.

Transforming sales

Sales force performance is a major challenge in most companies—a consistent concern for chief sales officers who know that the overall profitability of their enterprise depends on either reducing the cost of sales or boosting the revenue their organization generates. Yet, according to Accenture research on high-performance workforces, as few as 25 percent of senior sales executives believe their workforce performs at a high level.

The chief sales officer is compelled to drive sales revenue further and faster—for example, by entering new geographic markets or by increasing sales to small and mid-sized businesses. Tapping these oppor-tunities may call for strategies and approaches that are significantly different from those the sales workforce understands—for example, driving sales through indirect channel partnerships.

With product lines growing more complex, as new products and service bundles are introduced to meet changing customer expectations, an unprepared or poorly equipped sales force poses a major impediment to improving sales productivity and increasing revenue.

A recent Accenture study illustrated the magnitude of these challenges by discovering that more than 30 percent of chief sales officers believed they needed to improve the alignment between their companies’ solutions and their customers’ needs. Nearly 40 percent also conceded that they needed to improve the way they communicate with customers.

Most sales organizations, however, are hard wired to focus on just one element: the sales transaction. In addition, few have conquered the challenge of making a more customer-centric approach repeatable across multiple sales opportunities with a wide range of customers. Lacking both

flexibility and adaptability, they find themselves severely handicapped when they attempt to reach new buyers, expand into new markets or in any way attempt to refocus the sales force on different goals or methods.

Enhancing sales performance and productivity

Given the growing complexity of the sales environment, it’s no surprise that many organizations have seen a decline in sales force productivity. With growth now a focus of the executive suite, sales executives are under extreme pressure.

Experienced salespeople know how to sell existing offerings to existing clients, yet even the most experienced may struggle to adopt new sales strategies designed to spur growth: cross-selling, up-selling, capturing new business and reaching new customers. In fact, Accenture has found that while more than half of companies believe they are capable of expanding sales with existing customers, only 23 percent feel equally confident about their ability to acquire new accounts.

In addition, sales performance tends to be managed using metrics based on the lowest costs of sales. Shifting to new metrics that reward salespeople for performance across the sales spectrum—from pre-sales through to post-sales interactions—requires a level of boldness and innovation relatively rare in the typical salesforce culture.

Accenture believes that companies can simultaneously reduce their cost of sales and boost revenues by focusing on selling behavior and sales intel-ligence. Giving this key workforce access to the information they need to perform higher, and helping both new and existing sales representatives embody the personalities, competencies and behaviors exhibited by the most successful salespeople, will help the enterprise take major strides toward new goals for revenue and productivity.

Accenture helps sales organizations identify customer preferences at every stage of the relationship, and match those preferences to the sales talent best suited to each stage. We help them identify critical selling skills and develop stronger approaches to acquiring, retaining and compensating talented people. We also work with sales organizations to determine the technologies they need to support their professional talent and optimize the latest tools for capturing, analyzing and sharing business intelligence.

As a result, we help the sales organiza-tion boost revenues, increase sales pro-ductivity and reduce the cost of sales. We have helped improve our clients’ sales conversions, boosted sales quota attainment and developed systems that enable new sales hires to become proficient very quickly. By working with Accenture, sales organizations acquire and use deeper customer insights, improve selling behaviors, closely align sales initiatives with sales strategy and implement stronger sales capabilities.

Transforming customer service

Over the last decade, companies have implemented more and more varied interaction channels and the customer experience now typically spans multiple touchpoints. With so many points of contact to manage, the cost of customer contact is exploding—globally, corporations invest billions annually in managing customer contact. Yet despite their investment, customer satisfaction remains low: in a recent Accenture survey, for instance, nearly half (47%) of the respondents said that companies meet their expec-tations only sometimes, rarely or never.8

Customer service has also grown more complex. Customers behave the way that they want to behave, and will contact providers for reasons and in ways that can be hard to predict—using different channels, for example, even changing channels in the course of a single transaction—and their intentions are not always clear.


Accenture Service TransformationMortgage and savings provider HBOS changed the way its contact center agents handled calls and selling opportunities by implementing, with Accenture, a set of operational interventions called Perfect Call. As a result, customer satisfaction, call handling times, sales conversion and call consistency have all improved. HBOS is the United Kingdom's largest mortgage and savings provider, with over 22 million customers and 60,000 employees. It employs 6,000 people in its Retail Contact Centers which are based at nine locations across the UK.

What is clear, however, is the critical impact that poor customer service has on business performance. Accenture research suggests that the majority of consumers worldwide left at least one provider in the past year because of a bad service experience. However, consumers also reward good service: in our research, consumers identified service quality as their foremost consid-eration when choosing a new provider, and 77 percent reported being much more inclined to continue doing business with a company that delivers a positive service experience.

Even when customers don’t take the ultimate step of switching providers, most do not simply accept bad service. When it happens by phone, many will ask to speak to a supervisor or call back in the hope of getting a more helpful representative, thereby increasing call volume and operating costs. Many customers will also tell others about their experience—and, in today’s networked world companies are well-advised to remember the ability that consumers now possess to use the Internet to broadcast their criticisms.

Any company not working to tailor the customer experience to customer preferences—or any company that still serves customers the same way it did five years ago—is extremely vulnerable to competition. In our increasingly multi-polar world, competition can come from virtually any geography, including emerging economies such as India, China, Latin America and Eastern Europe. In this environment, the ability to deliver a satisfying service experience may be a company’s best source of sustainable competitive advantage. Yet few companies are distinguishing themselves for service quality.

Creating advantage through customer service

Leading organizations, however, drive growth by delivering a differentiated experience—designed around customer intentions and preferences—that is both satisfying and profitable. These leaders have mastered the new market dynamics that compel them to focus on becoming customer-centric. They are still working to reduce costs but now

they are doing it in the context of relationship development—protecting the customer relationships while trimming operating expenses.

Accenture has found that achieving widespread, consistent performance is the result of focusing on three key areas: knowing the customer, exceeding customer expectations and fulfilling promises to the customer.

Customers want to be recognized for who they are as soon as they contact you: their history, their preferences, their intentions. Leaders, therefore, build a blueprint for handling customer interactions based on detailed knowledge of the customer, and they execute this blueprint consistently regardless of how the customer contacts them—whether they call, come on line on the web; walk into a branch office. This can be tough; at many companies, this information tends to be scattered throughout the orga-nization or distributed between the customer, you and third parties.

Accenture offers integrated solutions to help organizations drive business through cus-tomer centricity, enabling them to respond to changing customer expectations, keep pace with changing market dynamics and execute with high certainty of results.


Telephony integration and management

Loyalty management

Marketing ROI

Marketing strategy

Actionable segmentation and insight

Customer- centric marketing

Customer data management

Campaign management

Pricing management

Trade promotion management

Marketing operations optimization

Sales strategy

Service strategy

Sales operations optimization

Service operations optimization

Sales channel management

Multi- channel synchroni- zationHigh-performance

sales workforce Sales technology enablement

Sales incentive compensation and reward

High- performance service workforce

Desktop and mobile solutions

Multi-channel self-service

Sales process design

Customer- centric sales

Customer- centric service

Service performance management

Field service and support effectiveness

Service delivery management

Billing/ customer credit and collections

Customer intentions and experience

Pace

Category, product and brand management

Flexibility

Certainty

Customer relevance

Enterprise agility

Enterprise execution


Flexibility

Customers today also expect instant gratification, and quickly become frustrated when placed on hold or transferred to another agent or directed to another store. Frustrated customers are also difficult to persuade to buy more or buy more often—they are in fact difficult even to keep as customers. Leaders more than meet customer intentions—they exceed them. Moreover, they deliver on their promises at the right time and every time, whether that is a day, a month or even a year after the original sales.

Accenture helps organizations transform the way they serve their customers by addressing all three of these dimensions. We begin by helping our clients create deep insight into customer intentions and preferences, and translate these insights into profitable actions. We also help them leverage the latest technology and process innovations for optimizing the performance of customer service operations. Through this combination of insight, innovation and operational excellence, we help drive growth, and shareholder value by delivering a more satisfying, more profitable customer experience—while simultane-ously reducing the cost of delivering customer service.

Accenture: Your guide to customer centricityThis is a time of tremendous potential and enormous challenge. Rapid commoditization and extreme price pressure are eroding traditional sources of competitive advantage. Increased competition is undermining customer loyalty. While emerging markets offer significant growth opportunities, at the same time, their very newness presents significant challenges.

In this increasingly complex world, the ability to deliver a satisfying service experience is the most powerful source of sustainable competitive edge—nothing else compares. To deliver the kind of differentiated customer experience that drives high performance, organi-

zations must become truly customer centric, incorporating the customer’s perspective, values and actions into their business and operations strategy, capability development and execution. For many organizations, this may prove to be a hard transition to make.

Accenture will help chart the most intelligent and practical course to achieve high performance in a world that is increasingly “multi-polar,” with economic growth occurring in virtually every geographic region and interdependency an essential part of global business.

Our knowledge of customer centricity—gained through extensive market research, and our deep experience, accumulated through years of client work—combine to create a powerful resource for transformation. Accenture will help quickly develop new growth strategies in light of changing consumer demands and new market opportunities. We help operationalize new approaches to customer segmentation, producing more relevant offerings and better dif-ferentiated service experiences. And we help execute these models, quickly and effectively, across the supply chain.

A legacy of leadership

For nearly two decades, Accenture has been a trusted advisor to the world’s largest enterprises on their customer-focused strategies and operations. Our work is grounded in research- based insights and unmatched delivery experience.

Accenture’s groundbreaking research into the defining characteristics of high-performance businesses and governments spans 36 industry segments and more than 6,000 companies. Through this research, we have determined that the ability to win customer loyalty is the defining characteristic of high performance in marketing and customer management. Organizations that enjoy strong customer loyalty also realize higher margins, revenue growth and shareholder value.

Moreover, we have identified the crucial capabilities characteristic of high per-formers—such as the ability to develop and consistently deliver a differentiated customer experience. Acquiring these capabilities—quickly, cost-effectively and with maximum performance impact—has long been a challenge for companies. Today, it’s an even greater challenge. The technology, for example, that enables the front-office capabilities needed to drive loyalty and growth is undergoing dramatic changes. While technology providers offer many more options today, many of these options are unproven or unfamiliar, and no single solution provides everything organizations need to achieve customer centricity.

Accenture offers a fully integrated set of solutions and services to address every dimension related to creating a satisfying, lasting and profitable customer relationship—from customer segmentation and analytics, to market and customer strategy development; from marketing and sales optimization to service management and contact optimization. We also offer integrated services for managing key operational elements—such as data management, campaign management and contact center management—on an ongoing basis, to ensure the effective delivery of an optimal customer experience.


Our solutions and services help orga-nizations drive business performance through customer centricity, by enabling them to keep pace with evolving market conditions, achieve the flexibility to respond quickly to changing customer expectations, and execute differenti-ated customer experiences with a high certainty of results.

Continuous investment in innovation keeps our offerings on the leading edge, by translating our client work into repeatable solution components—including several patents granted or pending—which speed delivery and accelerate benefits, while reducing the risk of implementing new capabilities.

Accenture continuously sets new standards of excellence in managing customer relationships, through innovative application of new tech-nologies and through breakthroughs in business process design and

management. Our reputation and success also attracts the market’s top talent—seasoned professionals from leading technology and service organizations who have proven their ability to succeed in both consulting and operations management roles. We have organized our professional development programs to ensure our people continue to build deep, specialized skills in marketing, sales and customer service.

Our client teams leverage a global network of Accenture-operated and third-party facilities, as well as—when preferred—the client’s own resources. This hybrid approach enables us to offer a mix of delivery and sourcing options ideally suited to the client’s performance targets—an innovative alternative to acquiring CRM infrastructure and execution capabilities that optimizes the balance of cost, quality and scalability.

Based on the scope and depth of our capabilities, Accenture is widely recognized as the leading provider of solutions and services that help clients achieve high performance. In recognition of our strengths, CRM magazine has named Accenture as the CRM consulting market leader for several consecutive years.


For more information about developing and successfully executing customer-centric strategies that help your organization achieve high performance, visit our web site at accenture.com/centricity

About Accenture High-Performance Research

To examine the impact of customer loyalty and how marketing and customer management can help companies increase margins and build shareholder value to become high performance, Accenture initially conducted qualitative and quantitative research on a sample set of decision makers at more than 700 business-to-business and business-to-consumer companies globally. The research identified and correlated specific capabilities with financial performance while pinpointing how these capabilities create and enhance customer loyalty to contribute to margin, growth and shareholder value. Accenture has since extended these insights in high

About Accenture

Accenture is a global management consulting, technology services and outsourcing company. Combining unparalleled experience, comprehensive capabilities across all industries and business functions, and extensive research on the world’s most successful companies, Accenture collaborates with clients to help them become high-performance businesses and governments. With 178,000 people in 49 countries, the company generated net revenues of US$19.70 billion for the fiscal year ended Aug. 31, 2007. Its home page is www.accenture.com.

Accenture’s Customer Relationship Management service line helps organizations achieve high performance by transforming their marketing, sales and customer service functions to support accelerated growth, increased profitability and greater operating efficiency. Our research, insight and innovation, global reach and delivery experience have made us a worldwide leader, serving thousands of clients every year, including most Fortune 100 companies, across virtually all industries.

performance with additional research, including an annual survey of consumer expectations and attitudes concerning customer service. The most recent Accenture Customer Satisfac-tion study surveyed more than 3,500 consumers in Australia, Brazil, Canada, China, France, the United Kingdom and United States.

customer centricity axisof high performance may2008

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customer experience

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