Customer Centricity

The New Axis of

High Performance
Customer
Centricity
Customer Centricity
The New Axis of
High Performance
Focusing on the new
consumer
Today’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.
1
The Customer Service Dilemma: Balancing Cost
and Quality. Accenture White Paper. 2006.
Customer Relationship Management 3
 Drivers of Change

1. Consumerism

Product-centric 2. Commoditization Customer-centric

competition • More options, lower prices differentiation
• Customer portability
• Product ubiquity
• Shorter lifecycles for innovation

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

4. Saturation
Seller-drive Buyer-driven
• Over-stored/overcapacity
market market
• Liberalization (Europe and
Free Trade)
• Virtualization (Internet)

Organizations must respond to the forces

reshaping the global economy—or risk
becoming irrelevant and, ultimately, obsolete.

Why customers are product information and the opinions

of other buyers are easily available,
markets will require new insights and
new approaches to marketing, sales
the new focus courtesy of the networked world. and customer service.

For 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
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
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
2
Estimate adjusted for purchasing power
differences.

4 Customer Centricity—The New Axis of High Performance

 Differentiated
customer
experience

Differentiation Loyalty Profitable growth

Product and experience define a
combination that stands out for
target customers
Competitive moat created around
customers, who become less
sensitive to price and focus on
total value and convenience
Minimize impact of "me—too"
price and promotions
Entry to new markets/segments
profitably

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.

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.

Customer Relationship Management 5

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

Customer relevance Execution excellence

Market leaders convert
advanced customer insight
into value through products,
services, experience and
marketing.
High performers implement
people and business
processes and technology
capabilities to deliver
a tailored customer
experience.

Accenture believes that true customer

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

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
centric
Becoming 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.

6 Customer Centricity—The New Axis of High Performance

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.

• How are you responding to the buyer-driven market?

• How well do you know your customers?

• Just how loyal are your customers?

• Is your customer experience differentiating or diluting?

• How are your brand and your experience (stores, products,

metrics) tailored around the world?

• Who in your organization has accountability for the

customer experience across fragmented organizations?

• Do you simply offer multiple channels, or is your customer

experience truly multichannel?

• How do your customers participate in and own the

innovation process?

• Do you know where to place your bet on customer

centricity: on important projects or on a strategic program?

Customer Relationship Management 7

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.
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.
The new physics of
marketing, sales and
customer service
Transforming 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 Marketing Accenture Sales

Transformation
Societe 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."
Transformation
In 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.

8 Customer Centricity—The New Axis of High Performance

Consider Samsung Electronics: With
14 product categories across 200
countries, Samsung’s marketing
executives manage a complex matrix
of customer-centricity options. At
companies such as Johnson & 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
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?
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
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?
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.
6
Innovation and Profitable Growth. Accenture
and the Economist Intelligence Unit. March 2006.
7
Carl Johnson and Henry Rak, “Reframing the
Market to Achieve Transformation Growth,”
Grocery Manufacturers of America Forum,
Winter 2005.
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?
Customer Relationship Management 9
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
8
Customer Satisfaction in the Changing Global
Economy, Accenture 2007.
10 Customer Centricity—The New Axis of High Performance
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
Transformation
Mortgage 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.
Customer Relationship Management 11
 Service
strategy

Field service Customer-

and support centric
effectiveness Sales service
strategy
Pace Enterprise Customer Flexibility
agility Sales relevance
Service
delivery process
Marketing design
management strategy
Actionable
segmentation
Loyalty and insight
management
Customer- centric
Billing/ marketing Service
Customer-
customer Customer centric performance
Marketing intentions
credit and ROI Customer data sales management
collections and management
experience
Category,
Marketing product
operations and brand
optimization management
Sales Campaign Trade Sales
operations management promotion channel
optimization management management
Service Pricing Multi-
operations channel
optimization management synchroni-
High-performance Sales incentive zation
sales workforce compensation
Sales and reward
technology
High- enablement Multi-channel
performance self-service
service workforce
Desktop Telephony
and mobile integration and
solutions management

Enterprise
execution

Accenture offers integrated solutions to help Certainty

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.

12 Customer Centricity—The New Axis of High Performance

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 centricity
This 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.
Customer Relationship Management 13
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
14 Customer Centricity—The New Axis of High Performance
management. Our reputation and Based on the scope and depth of
success also attracts the market’s our capabilities, Accenture is widely
top talent—seasoned professionals recognized as the leading provider
from leading technology and service of solutions and services that help
organizations who have proven their clients achieve high performance. In
ability to succeed in both consulting recognition of our strengths, CRM
and operations management roles. magazine has named Accenture as
We have organized our professional the CRM consulting market leader for
development programs to ensure several consecutive years.
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.

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.
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.
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.
Customer Relationship Management 15
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