Customer-Focused Organization
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A Customer-Focused Organization is an organization whose strategy is to improve customer-performance measures.
- Context:
- It can monitor Customer-Focused Measures.
- It can practice Customer-Focused Marketing.
- It can nurture a Customer-Centric Organizational Culture.
- …
- Example(s):
- Counter-Example(s):
- See: Customer-Centric Analytics Data Model.
References
2019
- (AMANET, 2019) ⇒ "The Customer-Focused Organization." Jan 24, 2019
- QUOTE: ... customers who are more informed, educated, and demanding than any past generation could have imagined. Those customers are the lifeblood of organizations; companies that fail to focus their cultures, strategies, and especially, their workforces on pleasing those customers are simply courting failure. High-performance organizations (HPOs) — defined by the Institute for Corporate Productivity (i4cp) on the basis of revenue growth, profitability, market share, and customer satisfaction over time — understand that customer focus is a complex blend of elements: attraction, engagement, satisfaction, collaboration, retention, and more.
When research by i4cp and the American Management Association (AMA) examined customer focus through the lens of high-performance, findings showed that the majority of those top organizations strive to keep promises to customers, take every opportunity to know their customers well, and affirm that their companies exist largely to serve those customers. In fact, three-quarters of business leaders from high performance organizations declared their companies to be more customer focused than their competitors. ...
... Four key findings
- Customer alignment starts high and runs deep. The behaviors of executives support customer focus in high performance organizations, and the practice is drilled down to include the behaviors of middle managers, too.
- Customer satisfaction is good, but customer advocacy is better. Satisfaction is the global standard for measuring customer focus, but high-performers recognize that active, engaged customers are the gold standard.
- Customer focus is data driven. In the age of big data and evidence-based business activity, high performance organizations use customer insights to shape products, services, and strategy.
- Technologies enable customer connections. From CRM software to social media, high-performers leverage high tech to achieve high touch with customers worldwide.
- QUOTE: ... customers who are more informed, educated, and demanding than any past generation could have imagined. Those customers are the lifeblood of organizations; companies that fail to focus their cultures, strategies, and especially, their workforces on pleasing those customers are simply courting failure. High-performance organizations (HPOs) — defined by the Institute for Corporate Productivity (i4cp) on the basis of revenue growth, profitability, market share, and customer satisfaction over time — understand that customer focus is a complex blend of elements: attraction, engagement, satisfaction, collaboration, retention, and more.
2011
- (Vorhies et al., 2011) ⇒ Douglas W. Vorhies, Linda M. Orr, and Victoria D. Bush. (2011). “Improving Customer-focused Marketing Capabilities and Firm Financial Performance via Marketing Exploration and Exploitation.” Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science 39, no. 5
- ABSTRACT: Evidence within the marketing literature has shown that marketing capabilities are important drivers of firm performance. However, very little is known about how firms improve their marketing capabilities via the embedding of new market knowledge. Organizational learning theory provides us with a theoretical lens through which we can examine how existing customer-focused marketing capabilities may be improved and new customer-focused marketing capabilities may be created via marketing exploitation and exploration capabilities. In addition, this study investigates whether ambidexterity in marketing exploration and exploitation exists and finds that firms cannot do both at high levels without risking a negative impact on customer-focused marketing capabilities. This study also presents findings demonstrating how improving the two customer-focused marketing capabilities in our study, brand management and customer relationship management, impacts objective financial performance.
2000
- (Homburg et al., 2000) ⇒ Christian Homburg, John P. Workman, and Ove Jensen. (2000). “Fundamental Changes in Marketing Organization: The Movement Toward a Customer-focused Organizational Structure.” Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science, 28(4).
- ABSTRACT: As we approach the millennium, there have been a number of articles written about the future of marketing and changes in marketing’s organization and role within the firm. However, there has not been research that holistically explores key changes in marketing organization in an empirical setting. The authors draw on qualitative interviews with fifty managers in the United States and Germany and identify three changes in marketing and sales organization: an increasing emphasis on key account management, changes in the role of product management, and increasing dispersion of marketing activities. They then argue that a more general organizational shift is taking place from product- focused to customer-focused organizational forms and consider implementation issues in making this transition. They conclude with implications for academic research, managerial practice, and business school curriculum.