We can’t deny the fact that we are living in the era of Customers. Many marketer had claimed previously that’s it’s the competitive advantage which has engaged a company to win over its customers. However, within recent time the Amazon, Cisco, sales force.com have come forward to prove this wrong and introduced the concept of customer centered company. In fact, Amazon.com has taken the lead by embarking upon the mission to be the world’s most well known customer centric company, where customers are allowed to buy anything they want online at the lowest prices.
A customer centered company is involved in the process of developing a quality product according to the needs/wants of the customers and responds promptly to their complaints and queries. These companies try their best to implement such strategies that addresses the customer’s needs and adapt their functioning and strategies on the current consumers buying patterns. The customer centered companies are able to identify opportunities and introduces new trends in the market in order to keep up the sustainable brand image and profitability.
In today’s world, customers can easily acquire and share relevant information about the good and bad encounters with companies. This provides a good incentive for companies to work hard to make customers happy, before and after doing the purchase. Nowadays marketers and all those individuals within the workforce have direct visibility into customers, more access to technologies that enables them to hit and exploit on consumer’s data. A company that make customers their centre of focus and redesigns their whole planning process by fulfilling needs and wants of the customers are more profitable. By creating an effective customer centered business plan that begins with a mission and ends with some action steps that leads an organization towards success. In other words, the whole process is performed to assess what is the company doing, why are they doing and what they must do to improve their company’s performance. This annual process keeps the business on track to achieve its long term goals that leads to effective persistent measures.
[large]Marketers today understand this notion of getting focused on growing the lifetime value of their customer relationships. By retaining customer loyalty, selling related goods and services, extending product’s offering to fulfill more of customer’s needs and wants are all effective ways to increase customer equity. Think about an old story of Oldsmobile, an American car brand who was launched than any other brand who is in existence today. In 1980s, the brand had outstanding brand equity with its customers. As with the passage of time, the target market of Old got complete old. The managers of the parent company i.e. General Motors realized that the market share is meant for appealing the youth who now took the brand as old-fashioned. Therefore, the General motors’ in 1988 started a new ad campaign that raised the slogan of “A new generation of olds”. Since then the market share had increased from 1.6 % to 6.9% .
So why did the General Motors spend so much time and money to reposition and revamp such a worn-out image? Why didn’t the General Motors move the youth to adapt to other product’s offerings or introduce a new brand all geared up according to their tastes? It’s because such leading companies are known at bringing up the customer’s voice into boardroom. They should strive hard to make customers realize that you are ready to help them, whether they need it or not.