Customer Responsive Culture

By Raul Bernardino

Introduction:

The organizations cultures are built from their visions and missions. It is including organization share values, knowledge’s, experience, and various cultures and attitudes that are coming from each of the employees - who have taken apart in the organization itself. The organization culture itself is also growing from time to time according to the organization development.

Buchanan D. A. & Huczynski A. A. (2007) “stated that the organizational culture is consist of the visions, missions, shared values, beliefs, and norms where the organization exist, feelings, and also action of each employees”.

In today’s globalization era, the competitive of the Information and Technology industries are now became more and more focusing on the customers and services. Whereas, the information and technology, including developers and system engineers are now entry into the globalization market and have to engage more new customers. However, it is most important, “to not lose the old customers and it is becoming habit to increase their (old customers) loyalty to the organization (Berger & Berger, 2000: 497)”.

Therefore, lot of organizations are now putting a site their capital of the investment or their money to invest in the Information and Technology sector, in which is hoping to manage the customer or Customer  Relationship Management (CRM). This CRM software package is to record all requests from customers and process them all according to schedule of services or in timely manner. This system is also able to log all transactions from the customer and logs all developers’ tasks.  

Nowadays, industries are also facing time compression during delivering their products and services. Therefore, they should be able to mobilize a lot of resources from their branches offices and from another company’s resources in order meet customer requirement and needs. Today, technology can help industries to connect, communicate, coordinates those resources in order to reach out the customers within high standard quality and less cost.  

In every organization use to have an organization promotion, in which to engage the customers that are come to the office or department and doing some technical job in the field. The receptionist is acting on behalf of organization employees to attend all organization’s customers. The receptionist is our “front line to connect us with customers (Jobber & Lancaster, 2009:4-5)”. He or she has to attend several training's on how to behave and attend the organization customers or guests.

One of great example is that organization has to treat customers as a ‘king’.  “Of course not all kings are the same”. The important is to maintain good relationship with the customers. Specially organization needs to build a mutual trust and also sees the customers are valuable from them.

Customer Relationship Management (Payne, 2006) is based on the belief that in order for a company to maximize long term profit, customer needs must be understood and leveraged (Stringfellow, Nie & Bowen, 2004). Payne and Frow (2005), report that the definition of CRM varies widely. One end of the spectrum deals with very tactical and targeted technology solutions while the other end considers customer relationship management a holistic and strategic approach to increasing shareholder value (Payne &Frow, 2005).

Many organization leaders are care about CRM but some of them are not care about the strategy. How to shift an organization to a customer-centric strategy? During strategic planning session (Saloner et al., 2001:19), strategies are formulated by creating a short and long term corporate goals, defining company scope (products and services offered, markets serviced), clearly defining the corporate position on how the industries will gain and sustain competitive advantage, and detailing which strengths. The organization will be leveraging and maintaining that competitive advantage.  

Brache (2002) notes that when creating a strategy, there are a number of questions that need to be addressed as they relate to the fundamental values and beliefs of a company: the timeline for the strategy, where business will be done (customers and geographies), where investment needs to be made, which competitive advantages will be exploited, which systems/skills/processes are required to support the competitive advantage, and which metrics will be used to measure results (Brache, 2002:51).

According to Galliers and Leidner (2003), information systems strategy should complement corporate strategy. They suggest that strategic systems information planning.

Conclusion:

In todays’ businesses, the customer’s responsive cultures are becoming focus of every companies, organizations, institutions, and industries in order to be success in the field. Most of the organizations are investing a lot in the Customer Relationship Management Packages, and other relevant business databases.  Rust and Verhoef (2005), “whose CRM model exploited the high level of heterogeneity in customers’ responsiveness to marketing interventions”.

It is also become a habit for the companies or organizations to strategize and engage the old customers with different treatments and attractive packages in order to maintain the customer to not run away from them.

References list:

• Huczynski, A & Buchanan, D (2007) Organizational Behaviour (6th Ed) Essex: Pearson Education
•  Jobber, D., & Lancaster, G., (2009), Selling and Sales management. 8th edition. Pearson Prentice Hall
•  Berger, L. & Berger, D., (2000). The Compensation Handbook: A State-of the-Art Guide to Compensation, Strategy and Design.4th edition. USA.
• The Path to Customer Centricity [On-line]. Available from: http://jsr.sagepub.com.ezproxy.liv.ac.uk/content/9/2/113.full.pdf+html (Accessed: 27 August 2013)
•  Ballard, K. (n), Building a Strong Customer-centric Strategy to Enable CRM and Develop Customer Loyalty [On-line]. Available from: https://scholarsbank.uoregon.edu/xmlui/bitstream/handle/1794/7662/2008-Ballard.pdf?sequence=1 (Accessed: 27 August 2013)
• NN (Feb 2013) "The Path to Customer Centricity" [On-line]. Available from: http://info.iknowtion.com/the-path-to-customer-centricity-peppersandrogersgroup/ (Accessed: 27 August 2013)
• NN (May 2006) Roadmap to a Customer-Centric Strategy [On-line]. Available from:
• http://www.amanet.org/training/articles/Roadmap-to-a-Customer-Centric-Strategy.aspx  (Accessed: 27 August 2013)