Building Customer-First Organizations: A Blueprint

Deloitte has developed a strategic model that integrates customer strategy, experience management, pricing, digitization and data, commercial excellence and organizational transformation to form a blueprint for companies aspiring to achieve excellence in customer experience (CX).

Our forthcoming series of articles outlines this model, focusing on fundamental aspects of customer experience management. We begin by establishing a robust customer service strategy, which can then be used to anchor every organizational decision, a foundational step for any business prioritizing CX. Next, we explore the role of human-centered service design in meeting diverse customer needs and enhancing customer engagement, followed by an in-depth look into the transition from traditional customer journey mapping to dynamic journey management that deepens customer engagement.

The series further analyzes the strategic impact of pricing and personalization, considering how Zuora’s platform can be used to implement customer-centric, subscription-based business models. Finally, we summarize the lessons we have learnt from building experience businesses with clients over the past decade. We advise on how to position the transformation, how to organize, where to start and how to measure progress over time.

Through this collection of articles, we aim to chart a course in experience management transformation, providing a comprehensive understanding of each aspect's contribution and the collective impact in empowering organizations to excel in today's experience-driven market.

Chapter 1: Crafting a customer-centric strategy

This chapter explains why a robust customer strategy is key to navigating the evolving business landscape and laying the groundwork for building customer-first organizations. It outlines the factors that are fundamentally changing the customer experience, before identifying six potentially transformative opportunities for organizations and providing pointers on how to start developing a service strategy.

Chapter 2: Creating the service concept

To remain relevant, organizations have to effectively serve a diverse group of customers with differing levels of digital literacy and preferences for personal contact versus self-service. Therefore, service delivery cannot take a 'one size fits all' approach – it needs to be human-centered. This chapter explains how to create a service concept that will give the organization insights into how resources can be used more effectively and where further improvement or innovation is needed.

Chapter 3: Implementing journey management

A shift from traditional customer journey mapping to dynamic journey management will provide an organization with a more integrated, continuous and strategic method of enhancing the customer experience. By adopting journey management, organizations can address customer needs holistically and responsively, ensuring every interaction is aligned with their overarching experience goals.

Chapter 4: Embracing customer-centric models

Both consumers and businesses are looking to move away from product ownership towards flexible, personalized experiences. Zuora's subscription management platform can help businesses offer consumption-based pricing and a seamless, personalized cross-channel customer experience.

Chapter 5: Architecting your experience business

Building an experience business usually requires a large-scale transformation that is both demanding and rewarding. It touches upon people, teaming, technology, data, governance, knowledge development, processes and much more. It is likely to impact your entire organization and is an ongoing journey, rather than a one-time project.