news articles

June 2017 "Whose customer is it anyway?..." by esps global

 You probably claim that your business is customer focused but have you ever seriously asked yourself this question as part of your business strategy? 

Businesses exist for one main purpose – to make money.  To make money, the business must have customers and to have customers they must have something that the customer desires and is prepared to pay for.  So many businesses, even in this day and age, focus on producing something that they are good at or they ‘think’ the buying public will like and leave the business of selling that something to the identified target market (and anybody else who will buy it), to the ‘people in sales’. 

Often the sales force is a very small proportion of the overall work force of a company - sometimes representing up to 50 times its own numbers - yet sales people carry the culture and aspirations of the company into the public arena.  Mostly these individuals are driven by a combination of coercion and commission to produce the goods and meet the sales quota they are assigned. They are also the people who deal directly with customers and with whom most, if not all, of the intelligence about the customers is vested.  Sales people are asked to become the customer focal point for an organisation to ‘simplify’ the relationship with that customer (for the customer’s benefit apparently) and thereby the organisation’s relationship becomes as large or as small as the focus of the individual assigned.  In an ever more competitive business environment with constant pressures on customer attraction and retention, surely the focus on the customer must be paramount to the organisation and not as one-dimensional as many have been historically.

To gain the best possible competitive advantage with its own customers, businesses must know the customers as well as they possibly can, be proactive about the relationship and constantly be prepared to add value.  In order to achieve this they must have every person in the organisation working for and with the customer, constantly striving to do things better, in order to assist their customer to become more successful and so provide pull through for the vendor organisation.  Not rocket science at all you say – indeed not!  So why restrict your dealings with the customer to one facet of your organisation when the importance of the customer relationship must be paramount?

To be truly successful in maximising customer value the organisation must take an holistic view of the relationship and put in place processes and systems that give every part of the company access to both input and review customer data.  This does not mean the return to compartmentalised ‘mini-relationships’ between the customer and many disparate parts of the organisation – rather it means the building of a ubiquitous, customer-centric culture that is supported by an infrastructure of systems and processes, to truly enable informed and successful partnerships with your client base.

 This whole philosophy starts with the recognition that the customer belongs to the organisation and not an individual and that true success relies on that relationship.