The digital age means customers have changed profoundly and forever. Customers want to be understood and spoken to as individuals. They want to be engaged through their preferred channel, device or platform with smart timing and respectful frequency. They want to be surrounded by content and experiences that are inspiring, helpful and customised to them.

Today’s mobile-enabled consumers are constantly evaluating and re-evaluating their purchasing decisions. They will choose the brands most relevant to them at an increasingly rapid pace. According to Kantar Retail research, 71 percent of customers now deny that loyalty incentive programmes actually make them brand loyal. Instead, they’re looking for brands that are relevant to their needs at a precise moment.

As new technologies and big data shift customer journeys and expectations, relevant messages, relevant products and relevant interactions foster emotions that bond customers to brands. Brands must become relevant storytellers. Relevancy is the currency that now defines customer engagement.

In fact, research from Accenture shows that in the U.S. market alone, companies are losing $1 trillion in annual revenues to their competitors because they are not consistently relevant enough. Loyalty remains important, but this finding indicates that the future of marketing — and, in the big picture, many businesses — depends on serving a customer’s most relevant needs in the moment.

CRM, CX, Customer Journey and all other forms of data-driven digital marketing, achieve growth by being more relevant to more people on more occasions. But your customers don’t just belong to you. Your customer base is in constant churn and so you need to engage all customers about the things that matter, in the moments that matter, across the entire customer journey.

However, while relevance is a simple marketing concept it is really hard to deliver. It requires a blend of insight, data, technology and content.

 1.  Customer Insight - You need to uncover the ‘Customer Differences That Really Matter’ that will drive relevant customer engagement strategies, propositions and programmes.

 2.  Data - You then need to create customer types based on the differences that matter.

 3.  Content - You then create content, experiences and products that resonate with each customer type

 4.  Technology - You then need the technology to deliver the right message, at the right time, through the right channel, to the right customer type

So, to deliver relevance you will need cooperation from multiple areas of the business, and this is often the biggest barrier. In “Pursuing Customer Relevance in the Digital Age,” Harvard Business Review details the biggest impediments to consistently delivering a relevant experience to customers were functional silos, cultural resistance or change management, and a lack of a shared definition of how to define relevant experience.

For many years now, companies have organized themselves around business functions, marketing disciplines, geographies and product lines. Only since customer power increased have forward-looking companies begun to focus on organising around customer groups and understanding those groups—and even individual customers—in as much detail as possible.

Relevance should be the driver of everything you do in your business in the Age of the Customer.

Further Reading

If you need a better tech platform to improve customer relevance and don't know where to start - check out our blog on building a cross functional team to build a brief to find the right tech partner.