The Customer Centric Enterprise

Companies are being forced to react to the growing individualization of demand. At the same time, cost management remains of paramount importance due to the competitive pressure in global markets. Thus, making enterprises more customer centric efficiently is a top management priority in most industries. Mass customization and personalization are key strategies to meet this challenge. Companies like Procter&Gamble, Lego, Nike, Adidas, Land's End, BMW, or Levi Strauss, among others, have started large-scale mass customization programs. This book provides insight into the different aspects of building a customer centric enterprise. Following an interdisciplinary approach, leading scientists and practitioners share their findings, concepts, and strategies from the perspective of design, production engineering, logistics, technology and innovation management, customer behavior, as well as marketing.

Strategies for leveraging information technologies to improve customer relationships With E-business comes the opportunity for companies to really get to know their customers--who they are and their buying patterns. Business managers need an integrated strategy that supports customers from the moment they enter the front door--or Web site--right through to fulfillment, support, and promotion of new products and services. Along the way, IT managers need an integrated set of technologies--from Web sites to databases and data mining tools--to make all of this work. This book shows both IT and business managers how to match business strategies to the technologies needed to make them work. Claudia Imhoff helped pioneer this set of technologies, called the Corporate Information Factory (CIF). She and her coauthors take readers step-by-step through the process of using the CIF for creating a customer-focused enterprise in which the end results are increased market share and improved customer satisfaction and retention. They show how the CIF can be used to ensure accuracy, identify customer needs, tailor promotions, and more.

Over the past several years, leading companies have entered a period of major marketing and operational adjustment and convergence, or intersection. It’s a reaction to a critical fact of life: Customers—not organizations— now control the decision-making dynamics and how organizations are perceived. We are witnessing significant multichannel media application (and resultant omnichannel access by consumers), along with more effective and pervasive customer data gathering, analysis, and modeling. If you’re observing these major shifts in your own organization, you’ll need this book. Inside, you’ll learn how to build proactive customer communication, improve relationships, drive positive brand perception, optimize channel selection and message personalization, and enhance employee-related factors (hiring, training, reward, recognition), all leading to superior customer experience and a customercentric culture. In addition, the author has incorporated content on “Big Data” generation and analytics, which you’ll master while scoring a direct hit to the moving target—your continuously changing, and increasingly independent, customer base.

Designing the Customer-Centric Organization offers todayâ??s business leaders a comprehensive customer-centric organizational model that clearly shows how to put in place an infrastructure that is organized around the demands of the customer. Written by Jay Galbraith (the foremost expert in the field of organizational design), this important book includes a tool that will help determine how customer-centric an organization is- light-level, medium-level, complete-level, or high-level- and it shows how to ascertain the appropriate level for a particular institution. Once the groundwork has been established, the author offers guidance for the process of implementing a customer-centric system throughout an organization. Designing the Customer-Centric Organization includes vital information about structure, management processes, reward and management systems, and people practices.

This book presents strategies that put the customer at the center of an enterprise. It elaborates on the reasons for viewing customers as assets that a firm needs to acquire, develop and cultivate in order to generate profitable relationships, and champions customer profitability as the metric for measuring business performance. Further, it advocates the need to provide solutions to customers’ requirements with bundles of products and services. It broadens the definition of customer value beyond tangible benefits and price to include both tangible and intangible benefits and total ownership costs, while embracing a variety of unique customer needs. The book highlights the value of business planning, marketing and sales mechanisms and changing employee behavior to create lifelong, high-value profitable customer relationships that satisfy the customer’s needs. Competitive Advantage of Customer Centricity maps a new journey that entire organizations must undertake in order to achieve these lucrative goals.

IBM's battle plan for attracting new customers--and keeping them for life. IBM--history's most remarkable organization--stays on top by constantly honing and refining its marketing strategies. One vital strategy, however, remains constant: The customer must always come first. The Customer-Centered Enterprise is the only in-depth exploration of IBM's battle-tested Customer Value Management (CVM)--the revolutionary program that makes the customer's viewpoint paramount in every corporate process and management decision. In today's environment of similar or identical products, CVM's battle-tested techniques will help any company differentiate itself, retain its customers, and grow. Actual examples and case studies show how IBM and other companies have used CVM to align their organization capabilities with customer expectations--experiencing unqualified marketing success.