adminbemoans the lack thereof. Earlier on this year, I emphasised that more and more organisations are evolving from being product centric to being customer centric. We talk about it every now and then, but it’s not an easy process. You need to be able to strike the right chord between making profits and giving a customer the experience.
You cannot be effective in this respect if you do not use the new channels of distributing products and services.
That is why you see companies that have not embraced digitalisation or the Internet find extensive challenges stretching themselves to manage their customers.
For instance, you can not do justice to a customer if you are still using the traditional postal services method — by the time your letter is deposited into your postbox; you would have virtually lost a contract to a more progressive entity.
But what deters a firm from being customer centric? A lot of reasons are proffered but the one I observed to have the highest weighting is that often companies have no knowledge of the business processes that the financial managers must coordinate with other departments in measuring customer retention.
Some companies encounter challenges in aligning the organisational structure — the choice of who makes which decision is able to drive the value for the customer.
If an organisation is product centric, the sales manager may end up pushing different products to the customer without determining what the customer really needs.
Whereas a customer centric approach has a way of tailoring solutions to the customer’s ever-changing needs.
You cannot do this if the service culture is not inherent within the organisation. The marketing team has a task of teaming up with the accounts department to also plan, budget and control the expenses that would be incurred.
Incentivise your employees
Incentive schemes by their nature seek to motivate employees to become more productive.
Sales managers may need to be incentivised for increasing the customer equity level while account managers may be incentivised on the duration they get to keep the profitable customers.
Some organisations have created a centre that fashions Business Intelligence and shares it across all SBUs which contains unified and reliable customer data.
Such a centre allows for coordination among marketing and finance departments that have experienced challenges in coordinating.
One of the many advantages with this one is that there is less friction and deeper knowledge of the product.
This has an effect on making strategic decision on customer investments and resource allocations.
Also pay attention to each customer characteristic. For instance the customer you acquire through a newspaper classified advert should be treated differently to that who contacted you through your website.
The important point is that the level of retention of customers acquired through different channels is different.
This is the same way in which payback for investing in Malaysia, for instance, is different from investing in Saudi Arabia.
Measure each dollar you pay out
Each method or even each single dollar paid on advertising must have specific measurements on how successful the method is. The information gathered herein must be fed back into the system to make it more effective.
I remember at one time we had to do an overhaul of our website to ensure that the keywords come out more — that optimisation is what is needed.
Naturally when a company introduces a new product, more resources are built into it to expand it.
Once the customer base if fairly large, the concentration is placed on retaining the profitable customer.
Till next week may God richly bless you!
l Shelter Chieza is consultant in management Issues- she can be contacted at [email protected]
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