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

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

As new technologies and big data shift customer journeys andexpectations, relevant messages, relevant products and relevant interactionsfoster emotions that bond customers to brands. Brands must become relevantstorytellers. 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 theircompetitors because they are not consistently relevant enough. Loyalty remainsimportant, but this finding indicates that the future of marketing — and, inthe big picture, many businesses — depends on serving a customer’s mostrelevant needs in the moment.

CRM, CX, Customer Journey and all other forms of data-drivendigital marketing, achieve growth by beingmore relevant to more people on more occasions. But your customers don’tjust belong to you. Your customer base is in constant churn and so you need to engageall customers about the things that matter, in the moments that matter, acrossthe entire customer journey.

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

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

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

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

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

So, to deliver relevance you will need cooperation frommultiple areas of the business, and this is often the biggest barrier. In“Pursuing Customer Relevance in the Digital Age,” Harvard Business Reviewdetails the biggest impediments to consistently delivering a relevantexperience to customers were functional silos, cultural resistance or changemanagement, and a lack of a shared definition of how to define relevantexperience.

For many years now, companies have organized themselvesaround business functions, marketing disciplines, geographies and productlines. Only since customer power increased have forward-looking companies begunto focus on organising around customer groups and understanding thosegroups—and even individual customers—in as much detail as possible.

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

Further Reading

If you need a better tech platform to deliver better 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.