With liquid, investable assets of € 150,000 to € 750,000 they are a highly attractive, but also highly neglected audience for any financial retailer, life insurer or asset manager.

We can help you capture these customers' loyalty, by designing and delivering products, services, business models and experiences that really connect to their needs.

Capturing the Mass Affluent opportunity

Futurelab wants to equip a select number of financial institutions with the methodologies, tools and templates to capture this untapped opportunity and:

• Find and understand Mass Affluent consumers using customer insight discovery and big data techniques
• Roll-out goal-based risk profiling, while remaining fully compliant with current and emerging regulations
• Plot investment products on to the goal-based risk matrix to enable close-match product recommendations
• Bundle existing investment products into tailored customer-centric solutions
• Leverage IT to capture customer goal data, risk expectations, constraints, assets and liabilities and time horizons
• Construct portfolios, select investment products (equities, bonds, term deposits and funds) fitting the client's goal-based profile 
• Report on portfolio characteristics (risk, performance, fit with profile) for sharing with customers
• Develop a comprehensive commercial strategic plan, including brand strategies and pricing of investment advice
• Define and describe a profitable, customer-driven investment experience
• Meet the challenges of the digital transformation
• Support a full roll-out and implementation of your Mass Affluent strategy.

For a full description of our views, please refer to our Thesis Paper: How to profit from Customer-Centricity in the Mass-Affluent investment market.

Everywhere print is being replaced by digital channels. For media companies who didn't sufficiently prepare in the past, this development can become a battle for survival.

Based on our media work in the US and Europe, we can help you transform your media house or publisher into a multi-channel proposition collecting revenues from a variety of sources.

Use audience-centric thinking to build new revenue streams

By being audience-centric instead of channel-centric, media companies can significantly increase their revenue potential. We can assist you in the development of new revenue streams by:

• looking at your audience as a community of individuals with values, beliefs and purchasing power
• leveraging existing content and capabilities for new (branded content) formats
• developing creative capabilities where advertising agencies fall short or have different agenda's
• creating editorial commerce propositions which translate media trust into commercial revenue

For local US newspapers, we have templated solutions to rapidly/pragmatically drive new revenue (regional exclusivity applies).

Life insurance markets are in full transformation. Regulators in many countries are changing the rules of business. Consumer trust has been shaken. Profits are under significant pressure.

By building on our life insurance experience and insights from a dozen countries, we can assist a select number of insurance providers to navigate these changes and secure future growth.

Securing growth through customer-centric life insurance

If you are a life insurance company, broker or distributor, we can help you drive profit and growth by:

• structurally reducing policy lapses through better customer experience and information management
• increasing premiums by developing value added insurance propositions and riders
• introducing a modular, needs-based selling approach which better connects to the customer's needs
• renewing the relationship with customers whose policy matures
• stretching your distribution mix across channels (incl. direct service)
• conducting digital transformation tailored to the specific requirements of your business  

Retail is in revolution. The number one factor in the profitability of your stores is Customer Experience. And we can show you the data to prove it. 

Are your stores making you fit for survival? Take our retail readiness test.

We don’t mean Customer Experience in general. On average. By and large. Averages are not actionable. Averages don’t shine a spotlight at store-level. Work with averages and you will only ever be, well, average. 

Give your store managers the relevant, store-specific insights they need to make a real difference – one that customers actually notice – and you’ll notice happier customers, happier staff and higher profits. 

Retail 360® helps retailers measure and manage Customer Experience store by store by store. Which store do customers rate best and how can we learn from it? Which store do customers rate worst and how can we improve it? What motivates customers at this POS? What exactly are they saying about layout, product range, service, staff knowledge in this store?

Our 7-step methodology delivers all the insights you and your local teams need to make each store experience positive, memorable and profitable.

• Leave the stats for Head Office: Get quick, simple, accessible insights at store level
• Last quarter is so last year: Get up-to-date, high quality data relevant to stores NOW
• Measure what you can manage: Get manageable chunks of immediately actionable data
• Take the guesswork away: See how to improve store experience so customers notice

Building loyalty in telecomms is a matter of getting a thousand little things right. But very often process thinking overtakes what really matters to the customer.

Based on our existing telco experience, we seek to assist a limited number of operators in generating growth and profits by better connecting to customers across their markets.

Drive telco profits through customer centricity

If you are a fixed, mobile or multi-play operator, we can assist you to:

• reduce churn by delivering a right-sized experience at each customer touchpoint of importance
• grow ARPU by creating innovative value propositions that emotionally connect to customers
• create customer journeys tailored to the specific needs of your audience
• increase customer referrals by introducing branded services and structured moments of delight
• grow profits by transforming the business from being bill-centric to being customer-centric  (Because of pre-existing customer relationships, regional exclusivities may apply.)
• transform digitally by implementing the best solutions for your business model

In the past the automotive heart was driven by hard facts like technology, engine power and security concepts. This is changing rapidly. Technology is pretty much the same throughout all automotive brands. Design, Mobility concepts (location based services) and connectivity are the new challenges to face. And even more the touchpoints at the dealer level and throughout all sales channels. To ensure a consistent brand experience the automotive industry must gain better consumer insights to connect to the consumers in an appropriate way and to offer a unique and inspiring experience for purchase and service.

Securing loyal customer relationships

If you are in the automotive industry, an engineering company, supplier, or car distributor, we can help you to manage these challenges by: 

• Gaining full consumer insights throughout all your channels
• Enabling you to create consistent customer-experience at all key touchpoints along the customer journey
• Consolidating the relationship with your existing customers and make them ambassadors of their local dealer hot spot
• Creating moments of Wow to extend their loyalty and make them premium users
• Introducing an alert system to enable your car dealers to react on each single voice of your customer and offer best service in class
• Transforming digitally to meet the new market requirements. 

See how we can help you close the gaps between desired end state of CX and current realities - check Automotive Customer Experience Support.

Customers judge companies on the experience they deliver. But in our multi-channel world, many organisations lack the mechanisms to pro-actively manage this experience. Their business rolls the dice at every customer interaction. 

We can help you "hard-wire" customer thinking into your business, so it "gets it right" when it matters.

Consistently create and deliver the "right" customer experience

Giving your customers a quick "wow" is easy. But unless you do it in a sustainable and profitable way, it is hollow ... and potentially very expensive. We can help your company right-size its customer experience across physical and digital channels so it structurally meets customer expectations and exceeds them where it matters.

We can help you do this:

• strategically, by designing and implementing a customer experience framework for your services, products and business
• organically, by motivating your people to take the right type of customer initiatives and scaling the ones that hold most promise
• tactically, by identifying the ways your business "can do better" and fixing this
• pro-actively, by scripting branded advocacy moments, which drive loyalty and word-of-mouth.

Specific CX Services

If you don't want to embark on a full customer experience design trajectory, we can also support you with tactical interventions. Notable are our:

• customer experience scans,  which unveil the real experience you offer your customers, and how you can improve it
• customer journey maps, which describe the reality and expectations at every touchpoint in every channel
• customer experience standards, which provide your business with actionable business objectives and KPI's related to CX
• branded service design, where we help you identify unique services and experiences that drive advocacy for your brand
• digital transformation alignment, where we ensure that your digital transformation efforts are actually benefiting your customers

The Net Promoter System can add tremendous value, but only if it is implemented correctly. Failure to do so, only leaves you with "yet another meaningless metric on a dashboard".

Direct, or in partnership with Futurelab Research, we can help you ensure that your NPS programme drives action, profit and a noticeable customer experience improvement.

Facilitate best practice NPS implementation

Our associates have worked on the leanest and the most complex of Net Promoter projects in Europe, Asia and North America. They have learned NPS practice in the trenches and can use this knowledge to assist you with every aspect of your Net Promoter programme. They can support you to:

• correctly start your Net Promoter Journey with business cases, management buy-in and a solid proof-of-concept
• establish closed loops which ensure that NPS data is actioned at all levels of the organisation
• organise international NPS roll-outs which are pragmatic/lean, consistent and inspiring to the people
• take your existing NPS programme to the next level through benchmarking, promoter activation, forecasting, ...
• introduce employee NPS initiatives to check and make sure that your people truly support your business
• conduct modest budget NPS pilots (via Futurelab Research)

In case you have already established an NPS programme, we can also help you improve it by benchmarking it against the best practices we have seen in the market.

Most businesses innovate, but few do it in a truly customer-centric manner. As a result, resources get wasted on initiatives that barely move the market while commercial opportunities are lost.

We can help you bring to market product, service, experience and business model innovations that are meaningful to your customers, your business and your bottom line. 

Design and bring to market customer-centric value propositions

We have developed a proven approach which allows your teams to:

• Identify and address customer needs that are ignored by your competitors and/or industry
• Rapidly learn from and copy "what has worked" in other industries and geographies
• Organise your go-to-market process around the customer, instead of company silos
• Ensure your digital transformation efforts are aligned with your customers' needs
• Enlist customers to co-design propositions which are "just right" for them
• Create multi-channel and engaging customer journeys

We can help you do this as part of your existing organisation or - should the need arise - as a separate "corporate venture".

Becoming customer-centric isn't a project or initiative. It is a company-wide journey which may take years to complete. We can help you at each step of the way.

Depending on your needs, we can do focused interventions, or walk alongside your business as it progresses from one customer focus stage to the next. We can even be your overall "architect".

Our job is to help you "make customer-centricity happen", profitably.

This means we assist in one or more of the following areas:

• Executive support: make sure that your senior leadership team supports the customer-centric direction
• Customer action: help your people really listen to the customer voice and act on it beyond "satisfaction mediocrity"
• Experience management: establish a company wide approach to pro-actively manage the customer experience
• Customer culture: light the customer fire among your employees, distributors and vendors, so they pro-actively get it right
• Business alignment: align all mindsets, strategies, practices and measures in the same customer direction
• Advocacy management: identify, nurture and activate the advocates your business creates, whenever it "gets it right".

If you would like to learn more, please visit also: 

• CCToolbox - Customer-Centricity 4-D Scan is a comprehensive, fixed-budget way to measure, manage and boost the progress of profitable customer-centricity in your business.

There are many places where you can learn how to be a marketer, accountant or corporate leader. But when it comes to "driving profit through customer-centricity", you're usually on your own.

We have lived your job and can help you take shortcuts, avoid pitfalls and set realistic targets on the journey of focusing your company on the customer. 

Pragmatic "on-demand" support

We're business people, like you, who have walked the customer-centricity path before. We're not magicians, but along the way we have picked up some tricks which can save you time or avoid costly mistakes. We'll gladly share them with you, either as discrete sparring partner, or more visible board advisor or even (part-time) customer-centricity lead. 

So it's probably worth having a chat if you are a:

• C-level executive who want to (better) put the customer on the company's agenda
• individual who has been newly appointed into a "customer" or "customer experience" role
• functional leader who wants to influence his/her colleagues in other departments to focus more on customer matters 
• HR leader who want to build a customer-centric culture in your business