Posts
Large retail corporations frequently attempt to invigorate their business performance by changing their relationship with their customer base. Frequently, these changes involve making the individual customer a more central part of a broader decision making process, especially when it comes to product assortment. This philosophy is known as "Customer Centricity", where the customer ideally becomes the center around which decisions are made.
When a customer has a good experience and feels that he is part of providing a solution, he is more likely to become a repeat customer, tell his surroundings about how valued he feels by the company, and how his individual requests and ideas drives value for the company. The question then becomes: Should corporations focus their attention on what each individual customer demands as part of their overall strategy, or should they set strategy in order to drive business to a larger segment of their customer base?
Although I agree that supporting the customer in order to drive business and customer loyalty is important, it can also be taken to the extreme. Rather than clearly communicating a strategy that places critical importance on customers as a group, many organizations fail to achieve their goals and objectives because they fail to communicate their strategy to their employees in language they can understand. More critically, in many cases where strategy is intertwined with customer empowerment, employees may begin to view each customer as an active participant and contributor to the corporate decision making process.
I am a firm believer that the customer should have a voice when it comes to his individual customer experience. I also believe that smart companies listen to their customer base for valuable guidance. I am, however, totally opposed to the idea that each request for products and/or service, by an individual or a sub-group, should be allowed to drive the corporate decision making process.
Ideally, having a voice allows the customer (as a collective entity) to impact corporate behavior on a larger scale, and confirms likes and dislikes to the corporation. However, when companies starts placing a disproportionate value on individual customer likes and dislikes, the business of successfully serving all customers with an established strategy falls apart.
What are your thoughts?
I would say "It depends!" Not a cop-out. First an individual has to look at the business model for the business. For example: a sit down restaurant that sell burgers may want to have "custom burgers" and listen to regulars that may want other foods like chicken on a bun ... However a place that is drive thru may not want to stray far from the 5 burgers and no or limited subsitution. Venturning too far may loose them some business but if they sell the fasted, best taisting burger they may not need to do anything else.
ReplyDeleteWhat I am saying is, know what you are good at, know what your demographic (who your customer) is, then let that decide if being customer centric (or the % of the customers influence) makes your business better or not better. Too many companies are "Me too" centric. They see some other company doing something and they want to do it too, not looking to see if they really want to be in "that" business.
A vanity book printer will want to listen much more customer input than a "big house" printer..
ReplyDeleteK:
Depends! Depends on the Following Variables :
ReplyDelete(1) The Cultural Capital of your Client Base Is Not Your De Facto "Friend" if you Fail to Nurture and Dignify It: If your Client Base is more Intelligent and more Conscious of your "Strategy" than a Fixed and Seemingly Interminable Policy is, a frustrated Client can "retalliate" Entrepreneurially to what S/He perceives as unacceptable degree of ambiguity. That is certainly, "The American Way" ( In my Opinion as a Successful American Entrepreneur ). Companies are run by Individuals, and are constructed by the affinities created by the Linkage of those individuals, and the so-called "Corporate Strategy" is often a homogenizing and blanket influence deliberately scripted to denigrate potentiliaty, agility, and innovation to prioritize the infamous "Yes Man" Politicking. In my Appreciation, truly "Objective" Corporations are Rare, and even rarer are their Superior Counterpart 'Harmonic Corporations' --- those that embody and holistically emanate Objective and Subjective Awareness, - that is - those embodying an Integration between the faculties of Reason and the faculties of Sentience/Evolution/Spiritual Nature-Drive.
The innate construct that is a Corporation - A Body Collective - based on Striation and Pecking Order, with a Mercantile Outlook tends to create a commercial psychological realism and tries to prefigure itself through "Consensus Realities" that are shabby excuses for Conclusiveness. That shabbiness, if "That is the Best a Group of People Can Do" in order to overcome their irrational antagonism and political appettite, translates to Absurd Policy, and whatever "Strategy" is then inculcated tends to be in some degree utterly Insane ( Take a Glance at "Contemporary Reality" in a 2010 Reality Check! ).
ReplyDeleteA Single Client, if enough vexation is caused WILL if S/he be Adequately capable, can entrepreneurially enforce upon the Corporatocratic-Gulag, a higher Principle, higher Will, and higher Vision, and can transmute the Spiritual Frustrations with bad apples, into his or her own Apple Orchard. I Know This, because that is Precisely what I have Done! It gets Tiring to be "forced" into becoming a Tycoon, because "Service Providers", that is, my Fellow Human Beings are Insensate, and Irrational, and Self-Sabotaging Marvels and Astonishments of the Cosmos!
I Quote Steve Jobs - an Innovator who has 'Also' displayed phenomenologically and championed this Transformation of the Frustrated Society Person into Harmonic and Self Evident Innovation. He states, "INNOVATION DISTINGUISHES BETWEEN LEADERS AND FOLLOWERS" (SJ). However, he has had as many near death experiences as he has iProducts, and in the recent launch of the iTablet or what have you, he looks like he has physically shrunken to a degree that his musculature can not longer quite loan itself to any kind of "form fitting" clothing, even his black turtleneck and Levis seem baggy. I don't have to poetic or speculative to ponder how he got himself in that state of physical emasculation! In other words, the relationship between the Individual, the Incorporated Monoliths and Megaliths of our times staffed by slavish peons of every stripe and banner of invention and humanity, and the so-called "Complicated" realities that "Experts" imagine themselves to "Understand" are highly overrated jargon for the willfull delinquency of the Human Spirit, which Negates, Abhors, and perpetually Antagonises against Harmony, Perceptiveness, Insight, --- and I see these as Spiritual Problems, which are Primary to the Mental Realm of "Miscommunication", "Strategy", "Pragmatism". No one has ever Solved nor Dissolved the implausible, unacknowledged, yet super-sensate excesses in human Inter-Relation by "Communications Strategies", "Contrived Vogues", and "Philosophical Rationales" "discretely" "Channeled" through Secular Dogmatism. And since no one has Solved it through these things, it is Quite Fair to suggest, the consequences from 2010 and forward may yet be considered sobering, and "Apocalyptic".
( 2 ) The Formulae of the Conditioned Multitudes: Corporate strategies tend to exploit the stupidity of those that they "Sell" to and all the veils placed on this fundamental truth is too embarassing for the Polity and for the Implementers alike, as "Like draws Like", stupidity draws, algebraically designs, manufacutres, and implements stupidity. That is why Corporations are NOT Visionary, and WILL Fail, though they have a Legal Structure designed for theoritical eternity, something as shrewd, manipulative, and technically evil as "The British East India Company" which still exercises through a re-imagined sequence of formulaes the Slave-Master Delusions through various exercises in "Communication Strategy" and so on --- the actual Incorporated Paper was auctioned off in 1996 I believe or thereabouts, for Five Sterling Pounds, --- purchased by some Character as an Iconic and Ironic Souvenir. Similarly the Deity Worshipping of Pharaonic Corporation, remains exactly just as Infantile and when one strips the Sophistry to its core, one sees it as a very humiliating autobiography of the Human Race.
ReplyDelete- So to Summarize -
"Does the Invidual Customer have too much Power?" - Neither the Individual Customer nor the "Strategic Corporation" has ANY Power. That is the greatest delusion there is, and one that is manufactured through gimmicks, jargons, and externalities! True Power, is by Nature, like Light, Spiritual, and it can not be "Obtained" - it is realized through Insight into our practical reality. Without TRUE Nobility ( Not the Kind that is fostered through perpetual histrionic and historical in-breeding and manipulation of the wheeze bore Slave-Slave Master confabulatoria ), with Principles of VIRTUES, HONOR, DIGNITY OF PERSONHOOD, THE MAN ABOVE THE METHOD, there is no Future for the Human Race, delinquent and illiterate - to both Reason and to Spirit. Being as the Human Race has, in its present Order, No Real Future, whether the Customer of a Corporation has any Power or not is essentially a Rhetorical Statement reminsicent of French Existentialism.
APPENDIX OF YOUTUBE VIDEOS TO REINFORCE AND REIFY MY OPINIONS :
(1)http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1bRi6gDLJ_g
(2)http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hd_ptbiPoXM
(3)http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ptUhDbMWCcU
Thank You Mr. Russell, for this Gracious and Charitable Opportunity at your Blog for Self Expression and what I am assured, is a very Mutual and Affirmative communion of One American Successful Entrepreneur with another! : ) Ultimately, we Sapient Hominids would have to bemuse ourselves for the Potent Cliches that we fulfill and perpetuate to Sate the Normative Appettite of the Soon-To-Be-No-More "Consensus Reality".
Yours most Cordially,
Alexander, MSMA
E: initiatives@theonemancompany.org
http://www.linkedin.com/in/alexanderrai
. . .