For executives in charge of setting and executing strategy, a base level of ambiguity has always come with the territory. Today’s level of uncertainty, though, is far from typical. Growing market share against the current backdrop of economic and social change and amplified consumer expectations is forcing organizations to rethink everything—and fast.

Leaders who successfully usher their organizations through this era of uncertainty will establish a legacy of adaptability capable of sustaining businesses during the toughest of times. But where should you begin? Customer centricity is the starting point.

Digital-native and digitally transforming companies alike are harnessing customer centricity to accomplish radical change at the speed of the consumer. It can be a superpower that helps businesses adapt to fast-changing market realities, as well as time hop to the customer moments that matter most.

Move From A La Carte To Ecosystem

Many consumers have become accustomed to brands knowing them on an individual level. Whereas early-stage Digital 2.0 interactions were a mixed bag of a la carte services based mainly on customer demographics, democratized data analytics has given rise to much more sophisticated segmentation. Organizations that thrive in the Digital 3.0 era will likely be the ones delivering much more holistic “lifestyle solutions” informed by needs-based consumer insights. And they should determine how to do so within a fully re-imagined—and constantly evolving—ecosystem of value.

That ecosystem of value should be hyper-personalized and therefore dynamic. What a life insurance policyholder, for instance, needs today is not what she’ll need tomorrow. The same can be said for more transactional experiences. A customer who once enjoyed his weekly trip to the grocery store in the spring of 2020 may have found himself loving delivery just a few short weeks later.

In times of uncertainty, organizations should make sure they have the cultural readiness—and the infrastructure—to deliver variable products, services and experiences that flex and flow with the preferences of their marketplace. Here are four customer-centered best practices to consider as you improve your organization’s superpower.

1. Get Clear On The Definition Of ‘Exceptional Experience’

Across industries, I’ve noticed a growing consensus around the paramount importance of the end-user experience. At the same time, what makes an “exceptional experience” is the subject of much debate. Take financial services, for example. A working session of financial services and fintech leaders that I attended found stark differences in how participants defined “exceptional experience” within their organizations, from the helpfulness of contact center employees to completing a person-to-person digital payment.

Assign a cross-functional team to investigate gaps that exist between your customers’ definition of excellence and the organization’s delivery. Then, set and execute an exceptional-experience strategy that not only patches those gaps but also looks ahead to ones that may exist in the future.

2. Modernize Technology Infrastructure

Digital-native startups and other tech-centered firms have risen to customer-relationship primacy over the past few years. I think that’s largely due to their agile deployment of innovative digital technology, operations and services models that support solutions that enable consistent delivery of a positive customer experience. Why should you use agile methodologies? It’s because, from my perspective, consumers are likely to trust brands that roll out new features before they even realize they wanted or needed them. This happened frequently during the pandemic and is likely to have reshaped customer expectations for personalized, digitally enabled experiences. Meeting (or better yet, exceeding) those expectations could be one of the fastest ways to grow even during intense periods of uncertainty.

3. Lean Into In-Person Engagement When It’s Relevant

The firms that most successfully navigate customer-centricity in the Digital 3.0 era will likely not be the ones that abandon all analog channels for digital newcomers. Instead, companies should deliver exceptional experiences across the full customer journey and across the gamut of channels. There are an increasing number of use cases for starting a transaction online and ending it in person. BOPIS (buy online, pick up in-store), for instance, is an e-commerce evolution that has proven suitable for many retail brands.

Leaders should focus on patching holes that exist across digital and nondigital journeys. A quick way to lose loyalty is to drop the ball as customers move from one channel to the other. This often requires re-imagining the tech stack for a multichannel customer experience.

4. Optimize Data To Drive Personalized Experiences

Most traditional growth models presume that customer relationships will deepen over time. This should no longer be an automatic assumption given the multi-sourcing habits many consumers have adopted to meet their needs. Take banking, for instance. Consumers may have relationships with multiple financial institutions. Loyalty-dependent organizations are faced with a particular challenge when consumers jump from one brand to the next the instant an unmet need arises. Anticipating consumer needs by deeply understanding consumer behavior is an opportunity to digitally engage at the moments that matter.

As leaders help teams navigate intensifying consumer expectations for hyper-relevance, data will be a critical asset. Make sure that data is accessible to decision-makers so your firm can more readily identify unmet needs at the pace of the consumer and design its solutions into bundles of value that drive utilization and loyalty. By determining how you can best leverage your firm’s data, you can also develop strategies to earn and maintain loyalty from the most influential market segments.

Enable Continued Growth

To enable continued growth in the modern era, leaders should be in a state of constant reevaluation to understand if their hypotheses about customer expectations are still true and understand if they need to level up. Business is in a perpetual state of motion. We are continuously evolving, both in our use of technology and in interpersonal relations with the markets we serve. Leading through change requires supervisors, managers, CEOs and boards to be unequivocally focused on putting the employee and the customer at the center of operations to continually design an organization that earns growth and loyalty in every interaction.