Todd Hollander Market Research

There was an interesting article in yesterday’s San Francisco Chronicle about the benefits of corporations developing a customer-centric approach to business. The author defines a customer-centric company as “one that recognizes the only way to add lasting value to the company is to value the customer.”

While some may beg to differ with the assertion that this is the only way to add lasting value to the company, there is certainly a body of evidence to suggest that customer-centrism is one of the best ways to add lasting value. But how does a company that is not explicitly and implicitly customer-centric develop this orientation? The Chronicle article offers the following suggestions:

Seven guiding principles of successful customer-based firms:

1. Focus extensively on delivering value to customers.
2. Forgo short-term results and look instead at long-term business value.
3. Include senior-level buy-in in your customer-based program.
4. Share your customer-focused initiatives with employees, partners and customers.
5. Recognize that traditional measurement tools may not adequately track your customer values, such as emotions and loyalty.
6. Incorporate employee (and contractor) training as part of the customer-centric movement.
7. Identify internal stakeholders (owners, employees, partners, suppliers) and work to build support within this group.

These are good suggestions. Of course, they are not always easy. Take for example the point (#2) about forgoing short-term results in favor of building long-term value. This is a often a difficult challenge, especially for public companies. The recently-leaked memo from Starbucks Chairman Howard Schultz questioning whether Starbucks’ drive for growth and efficiency had diluted the customer experience underscores this challenge.

The bottom line: We can learn from the experiences of other companies and use these models to underscore the importance of developing a customer-centric business model. If we don’t, our customers will simply migrate to a company that has one.

This entry was posted on Thursday, March 8th, 2007 at 8:28 pm and is filed under Advice/How-To. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.