3 Key Benefits of Customer-Centric Strategy: The Dual Prevention Pill Example
Customer-centricity is all the hype these days. Many companies claim to be focused on their customers but can’t reasonably demonstrate the same in their processes and work culture. To be able to thrive in this modern business ecosystem, staying relevant in the eyes of your customers is imperative. As such, businesses will need to continually innovate in an effort to create and deliver value to their customers.
What Is Customer-Centricity?
Customer-centricity, or client-centricity as it is sometimes referred to, is an approach to doing business that focuses on delighting customers by offering them the best experience. In return, these businesses build strong customer relationships and gain brand loyalty.
Who Is the Customer?
Based on the definition of customer-centricity, a customer-centric business or organisation puts its customers at the core of all its ideas, operations, and philosophy. By looking at customer centricity through this lens, innovation and value creation can always be connected back to the customers. The customer, in that case, can be anybody who is the beneficiary of a process within your business’ value chain.
The Benefits of a Customer-Centric Strategy: The Dual Prevention Pill (DPP) Research Example
Let’s take the example of our market research findings on the Dual Prevention Pill (DPP) to draw out the 3 key benefits of embedding a customer-centric strategy into your business’ value chain.
The DPP is a pill meant to be consumed daily by women of reproductive age in order to prevent both HIV and pregnancy. It consists of oral pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP) for HIV prevention and a combined oral contraceptive (COC) for pregnancy prevention. In order to identify end-user viability, we conducted market research, on behalf of our clients, in the rural areas of Kenya, South Africa, and Zimbabwe - areas where both HIV and pregnancy rates are extremely high.
1. It opens new opportunities for innovation and growth
From the research findings, some of the women in these areas understood the benefits of the DPP but still had reservations about it. Even though most women were willing to take a pill to prevent pregnancy and HIV, some were comfortable taking two separate pills. Meanwhile, others were scared of their husbands’ reactions to the pills and anxious about the stigma that would come from taking any form of preventative care.
Knowing and understanding your customer's needs and challenges can shed some light on how they perceive value from your products or services. This will allow you to identify gaps which can later be leveraged for growth and improvement
2. It reduces churn
During the time of our research, we learned that governments and donors provided health insurance and medical subsidies to citizens, but contraception was rarely covered. This meant that the women in these rural communities wouldn’t be able to use this relief to purchase the DPP. They would therefore need to buy it from the limited number of clinics and pharmacies that were available. For many of these women, that financial implication was too heavy because they came from low-income households and most didn’t have access to insurance. They therefore couldn’t make monthly purchases of the pill making the pill a non-viable solution for them.
Through our research findings, our client was able to identify some of the inefficiencies in their distribution model that impacted their revenue. The market research provided them with tangible action points to address in order to build a viable recurring revenue model
3. It increases existing customer value
The market research process provided our client with different DPP use cases, their customer journey maps, as well as persona profiles of the DPP customer. Our human-centred design (HCD) approach to research offered actionable insights into their customers that could be used to design a new or improved solution for the women that made up their target audience.
By designing a solution that speaks directly to their customer's needs and challenges, the perceived value of the DPP by their customers would go up.
–
Customer needs are continually evolving. To be able to call your business customer-centric, you need to stay up to date with your customers' evolving needs and challenge your products and processes by innovating. Email us today via info@spindledesign.co to get started on your customer-centricity journey.