In this kind of organisation, profit is not their main motive of establishing a business, they first resolve to satisfy customers’ needs which will, in turn, generate profits more than they expected.
At the end of this article, you should be able to: · explain what a customer-centric enterprise is; · explain the stages that an organisation has to pass through before they can become a customer-centric enterprise; · know the reasons why an organisation has to be customer-centric; · functions and roles of customer-centricity in a customer-centric enterprise; and · Know the reasons why customer-centricity is the best solution for organisations experiencing customer attrition.
In this kind of organisation, profit is not their main motive of establishing a business, they first resolve to satisfy customers’ needs which will, in turn, generate profits more than they expected.
That is why CRM scholars have agreed that it is ten times better to do business from the customers’ perspective than from a product perspective.
In the word of the Gartner Group, they define CRM is an enterprise-wide business strategy designed to optimize profitability revenue and customer satisfaction by organizing the enterprise around customer segments, fostering customer-satisfying behaviours and linking processes from customers through suppliers.
In evolving into a customer-centric enterprise, an organisation tries to foster customer behaviours and they also develop business processes that will allow the organisation to do business from a customer perspective.
Apart from that, they have to come up with technologies that will allow customers to have a total experience irrespective of the channel that they are using to communicate with the organization.
Evolution of Customer-Centric Enterprise
#1 Product-Focused Enterprise
This is the default for many organizations. This is so because the primary purpose of the arty organization is to make a profit.
At this level, all that the organization is concerned with is, how they can increase productivity.
The organization here honour their staff based on the volume of sales they were able to make in a given year.
You should know that product-focused enterprise has much information about their customers but the information is not structured in a way that it can be used to satisfy customers needs.
#2 Customer Focused Enterprise
When an organisation begins with a product centric-vision, situation at times will force them to begin to reckon with their customers. they will now realize that they have to deal with arrays of customer issues which have much to do with the use of their products.
The organization will now realize that if nothing is done about the complaints, it may force them out of business.
This at times has forced many organizations to set up call centres in order to attend to customer issues and complaints.
The main purpose of doing this was to maximize customer and employees satisfaction.
#3 Customer Value-Focused Enterprise
Under this, the organisation tries to minimize the amount being spent on customers that are not really adding value to the organisation. The organisation tries to concentrate on customers that have a larger wallet share with them.
Take for example; MTN tries to come up with a programme that rewarded customers that load up to ten thousand naira airtime monthly.
The company knew that it would be tough for a poor man that could not afford to feed three square meals.
The main onus of this is to gather as much information as possible about the customers and to use this information in formulating strategies that will allow the organization to serve its customers in a dynamic way.
They see their customers as one of the stakeholders in the organization. In this kind of setting, all policies and actions of the organization are geared towards customer satisfaction and making sure that the brand lives up to expectations.
It should be noted that the CRM initiatives of these enterprises can help reduce costs by encouraging customers to render service to each other in communities of interest, promote the enterprise to like-minded people known to them at low cost, seek redress willingly in the event of a shortcoming, be enterprising in taking up new products, and remain loyal for life.
There is a need for organizations to operate from customers’ perspective as this will help them to retain their customers for life.
The only reason why profit is coming in the first place is that customers decided to remain with the organization.
Once they decide to spend their money somewhere else, profit will cease.
One thing is that customers love to enjoy their liberty, if an organization gives them that, and surpasses their expectation in terms of services, there is nothing that will make a customer in his right sense to lock somewhere else.
The mother thing is that if you are satisfying your customers in the right way, you will spend less on promotional offers and adverts as your satisfied customers will do the talking for you.
There will be an opportunity to cross-sell as they will gladly accept your new products and offerings and introduce your products to others.
It has also been said that the best way for an organisation to go, is to operate from a customer’s perspective.
Although this may not be profitable in the first place as you have to spend much in order to gain their trust. Once this is achieved, you can rest assured that you have had those customers for life.
Functions of Customer Centricity
We have all agreed that customer-centricity is the act of doing business from the customers’ perspective. There are some basic functions that customer-centricity is meant to perform.
It is the function of customer-centricity to increase the profitability of the organization. If customer-centricity is well managed, it will help the organisation to reduce its cost of production; once you are able to manage your customers.
it will reduce the cost that you to spend on acquiring new customers. This will ultimately reduce overhead cost and will also increase the volume/number of your products that your customer uses.
Customer centricity will also increase the bond between you and your customers. It will help you to know the exact number of customers that you have.
What are those things your customer needs and you can provide those needs? You must be able to know what your customer wants and how to meet those needs.
At times, you may need to know the network of people that your customer or prospect has before you can even think of the best way to serve them.
Once you are meeting and exceeding their needs, you will be able to sustain the bond between you and your customers.
Customer centricity will also increase customer and employee satisfaction. If customers are not satisfied, they will spend their money elsewhere, this will ultimately lead to loss of jobs and once the money is being spent elsewhere.
It will create tension in the mind of staff of your organisation. That is why you have to satisfy your customer so that your employees too will be happy.
That is why it is often said that employees satisfaction is customer satisfaction.
Customer Centricity: A Systematic Solution
Have you ever wondered why a computer system is called a system? It is a system because there are many components that come together before you can have what is called a system.
It is a combination of many subsystems that form what is called a system. In a computer system, you have application software like MS Word, Microsoft Excel, and Corel Draw, among others.
We also have the keyboard, mouse, and UPS among others. You would have been wondering, how then can we relate a computer system to a customer-centric enterprise?
Many organizations today in Nigeria have closed down because customers are no longer patronizing their organisations.
They have spent a lot of their hard-earned money on promotional offers such as: Be a Millionaire promo, 180 cars in 180 days among others.
This is not really necessary when you have a customer-centric enterprise in place. It is a policy that will allow you to do business from the customers’ perspective.
You will have to consciously examine and discover some facts about your customers and you will use that knowledge to decide on what to produce, how to produce and for whom to produce.
We called customer-centric enterprise a system because it is a combination of many parts that come together to become one.
You can leave one step aside and move to the other, and you are still expecting the same result.
You should know that in evolving into a customer-centric enterprise, you have to make up your mind that you want to operate from the customers’ perspective.
This will be backed-up with technology that is meant to ensure that your dream is realized. You need to practically learn how you can consciously satisfy your customers’ needs.
This will help your business.
When organisations are established, they provide access and ways by which their customers can reach them.
These include coming to branch offices, and meeting over the web and through the telephone.
Each of these subsets has its own method and components which were used for handling customer contacts,
A customer-centric enterprise always offers its services through the combination of these three channels.
In doing these, the organisation needs processes, technologies and services that are conditioned to take customers first and think about them in everything that they are doing.
Customer–centricity has much to do with rethinking the entire customer experience from the customer point of view.
NOTE:
Collaboration is a matter of degree, and the quantity of the software and services used for collaboration only defines how comprehensive the collaboration will be.
Collaboration you should know has its own price – the cost to the number increases as the number of application increases.
While collaboration CRM should be implemented in a “build–to–fit” manner, the more collaboration an enterprise wished to enable, the more critical the vendor’s support for both system–to–system interaction and heterogeneity.
In a customer-centric enterprise, the organisation tries to put machinery in place in order to meet up with the needs of their customer.
Even the workforce is trained to think about customers first before anything else.
They try to gather customer data from multiple channels in real time, analyse the data in order to find a correlation in the data.
The said data at times can reload some hidden customer behaviour and some basic characteristics that customers have in common, the organisation can now use this in making life decisions about their customers.
At its most basic, customer-centric enterprise requires that an organisation provides access to a wide range of functionality – which spans the enterprise and its IT environment – according to its specific role or job function.
They tried to educate their product users on new ways of using their products and some things that their products can do that are not, available for other products or services.
A customer-centric enterprise achieves its true value by adding value to their customer. These are achieved through integration and collaboration in a fashionable way.
You should know that data is the main thing in a CCE. The more data you have about your customers, the more you are able to serve your customers better.
The users must be able to access data that are outside their department, they should be able to use this data to solve customer issues.
This will now enhance the value of internal and external business processes and technology.
People-centric collaboration also requires that applications and services interact automatically with one another., without human intervention, in order to facilitate people–to–people collaboration.
This requirement for a system to–system interaction is a key behind–the–scene element in any people-centric collaborative environment.
The bottom lines are that CCE will lead to greater efficiency, a better return on human and technological assets, new business opportunities, and a closer and more fruitful working relationship between supply chain or value chain partners be they buyers, sellers, administrators or other service providers.
Collaborative customer-centric enterprise allows users from either inside or outside the organisation to access customer data as long as those actions will improve job performance in the bottom line.
The different users and the applications both within and outside the organisation must be able to interact and collaborate with one another.
An external client having a problem with accessibility can communicate a CSR who might be able to help him or her out.
The Benefit of Collaborative CCE
It brings about streamlined operations that offer lower transaction costs, error rates, and other operational efficiencies.
It also improves customer and partner relations that come from building tight links between technology and business processes. When done right, collaborative environments greatly enhance customer and partner satisfaction and help leverage all partners’ investments in technology and business process.
A people-centric environment provides a platform for changing products, partnerships, and business processes in support of dynamic businesses and industries that require “first–to–market” rapid response.
Above all, if a collaborative CCE is well planned and implemented, it will significantly impact the bottom line of the enterprise involved.
SUMMARY
In this article, we have discovered that:
A customer-centric enterprise is an organization that is doing business from the customers’ perspective.
There are four evolutions of a customer-centric enterprise, which are: Product-Focused Enterprise, Customer Focused Enterprise, Customer Value Focused Enterprise and Customer-Centric Enterprise which has much to do with 36O0 view of customers.
We have also observed that a customer-centric enterprise will help you to retain your customers for life. It will also ensure that both your customers and your staff derive maximum satisfaction.
Customer-centricity has to do with the act of putting customers at the centre of business
In collaborative CCE, users from within and outside the organisation must be able to access data that will improve business performance and help the organisation to improve on customers experience.
Collaborative CCE will lead to greater efficiency, new business opportunities and closer relationship among stakeholders in the business.
Some of the benefits attached to collaborative CCE includes:
The streamlined operation enhanced stakeholders satisfaction and leveraging of partners investment in business and processes.
Brainstorming Session
Use the diagram in Fig. 11 to discuss what CCE evolution is.
Do you agree that organisations should treat different customers differently?
Do you think that organizations should waste their time on non-profitable customers?
Action Point PS: If you would like to have an online course on any of the courses that you found on this blog, I will be glad to do that on individual and corporate levels, I will be very glad to do that I have trained several individuals and groups. They are doing well in their various fields of endeavour. Some of those that I have trained include staff of Dangote Refinery, FCMB, Zenith Bank, and New Horizons Nigeria among others. Please come on Whatsapp and let’s talk about your training. You can reach me on Whatsapp HERE. Please note that I will be using Microsoft Team to facilitate the training.
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