The retail consumer of today wants control and to feel like she is managing her own relationships. Every time a technology has given more power and freedom to the individual, the markets follow.

An ever increasing number of businesses are reinventing the way they interact with their customers by leveraging the investment they have made in marketing technology software. The proliferation of social media and advances in “adtech” and “big-data” analytics means that brands are now able to gain insights into their customers in ways never possible before. As these insights have started to float to the top of the company management structure, it is becoming obvious that having a customer-centric strategy is an essential part of doing business in the always-connected, post-GFC world. So what does being customer-centric really mean?

Customers have more power today that they have ever had. The immediacy and scale of social media is breaking down old company structures and traditional value chains. The proliferation of consumer data is adding to the pressure. Customer Relationship Management software, or CRM, was originally designed as a Business to Business [B2B] tool that was stretched and pulled until it eventually became a Business to Consumer [B2C] tool. But it was never really designed to manage today’s consumers who are generating (according to IBM) over 2.5 quintillion bytes of data every day – a number so baffling I can only assume it translates into more cat videos than anyone could actually watch in a lifetime.

Read more from the source: socialmediatoday.com