What is the benefit of being customer-centric?

What’s the benefit of being customer-centric? Here are two ‘show me the money’ success stories demonstrating how two new entrants have used customer-centricity to enter mature markets.

1. Slack

Why is Slack great? The main reason is that it is a more ‘human’ messaging system with every aspect designed around how we as humans think and want to communicate. You find examples of this in the detail. For instance, their simple message function reads ‘Jot something down' instead of ‘Message [username]'.

As founder and CEO Stuart Butterfield said, "When key users told us something wasn't working, we fixed it -- immediately."

Launch 2013 to $1billion in revenue in 2017

2. Monzo

Monzo aims to “delight” its customers. It looks to provide an “awesome” experience and solve problems their customers don’t even know they have. They do this by involving their customers in innovation discussions and beta tests – they are happy to transparently involve their customers in the journey towards creating a solution that ‘delights’ them. This has led to great innovations like ‘Freeze and defrost your card instantly’. Perfect for that moment we all have – losing your card, calling the bank to cancel it, then finding it the moment you put down the phone.

Success is seen in the joining numbers (largely driven by WOM) and high levels of advocacy.

Jan 2017: 0 customers

Dec 2017: 404,764 customers (they expected it to take 5 years to get to 300,000)