In a customer-centric approach, the goal becomes developing products and services to fit customer needs. In Seybold’s work, five steps in designing a customer-centric organization were suggested:
Make it easy for customers to do business;
Focus on the end customer;
Redesign front office and examine information flows between the front and back …show more content…
Optimizing customer relationships requires a complete understanding of all customers; profitable as well as non-profitable, and then to organize business processes to treat customers individually based on their needs and their values. Not long ago, companies with efficient facilities and greater resources were able to satisfy customer needs with standardized products, reaping advantages through productivity gains and lower costs. Mass marketing and mass production were successful as long as customers were satisfied with standardized products. As more firms entered the market, mass marketing techniques, where the goal was to sell what manufacturing produced, started to lose effectiveness. Target marketing, or segmentation, shifted a company’s focus to adjusting products and marketing efforts to fit customer requirements. Changing customer needs and preferences require firms to define smaller and smaller segments. It has become well known that retaining customers is more profitable than building new relationships. Consequently, relationship marketing was developed on the basis that customers vary in their needs, preferences, buying behavior, and price sensitivity. Customer relationship marketing techniques focus on single customers and require the firm to be organized around the customer, rather than the product.