Customer centricity has been a hot topic for discussions in books, business reviews, articles and forums for years, especially for latest 5 years. Customer centric initiatives have been embraced by a number of organizations in some industries among which retailer, ICT and service industries are the most outstanding.
In term of marketing, focusing on customer is not a new concept as great deal of marketing books have been written about how businesses should respect their customers and how the customer loyalty would help the profitability of companies. For instance, in a books titled ‘In Search of Excellence: Lessons from America’s Best-Run Companies.’, Thomas Peters and Robert Waterman Jr. proves that “the excellent companies are better listeners” and these companies are tailoring their products and services to meet the customers’ needs and wants. George Day also shares the view point as he supports the “market-driven strategy”. According to Day, “competitive advantages are rapidly eroded in today’s environment, connections to customers are more dynamic and enduring if they are well developed and maintained”. Apparently, customer satisfaction is always the center of all marketing efforts and, thus, customer centricity is the highest level of market driven strategy.
As customer centricity is said to be a must in global competition, this initiatives has been witnessed at major organizations around the world. Best Buy, IBM, Amazon and Citybank are among the best practices of customer centric innovation. However, customer centricity is not a status. It is more likely a process because there are some levels of this innovation. In a book entitled ‘Designing the Customer-Centric Organization: A Guide to Strategy, Structure, and Process’, Jay Galbraith advocates three level of customer centricity: low, medium and high. These three levels reflect how well a company integrates its products, services and processes to service its customers by meeting the ten criteria related to scope/scale and integration. Similarly, Francey Smith, president of Francey Smith & Associates, puts forward four degrees of customer centricity. These are getting started, beyond the basics, customer driven and fully integration. No matter what level the customer centric innovation at a company is, it consists of elements that the company must develop to become customer centric.
Read more: http://www.bukisa.com/articles/415290_a-discussion-on-six-building-blocks-of-customer-centricity#ixzz180Ie0Jag
