Customer centric marketing is a marketing approach that focuses on the needs of individual customers rather than the needs of the firm or a market segment. Traditionally, product based companies, have primarily focused on logistics and manufacturing. Basically, this entails improving efficiency. Similarly, for service based companies, the primary focus has been on the delivery of quality services. Customer service marketing in both product based and service based companies seeks to put the needs of the customers at the center of every core business processes. The sales and marketing departments of organizations interact with customers more frequently compared to other business functions. There much of the customer relations management practices have to be executed by sales and marketing. However, for customer centric marketing and business processing the aim is to ensure that not only marketing and sales creating customer satisfaction but all other business processes.
Making customer centric marketing effective will require systems that create changes in the designs of every business process including supporting technology, organizational culture, and organizational structure. Customer centric marketing and business processing has several aims and objectives. The first one is to understand the customers. Customer centric marketing seeks to develop an understanding of the needs and wants of the customers. The second aim is to treat customer in a manner they expect to be treated. Customers usually have expectation when they interact with businesses. Thirdly, customer centric marketing aims at anticipating the needs of the customers and responding effectively to their actions.
Unlike in customer relations management where high level of importance is placed on understanding behaviors of customers and exploiting that for the benefit of the business, customer centric marketing approach simply places high importance on respect for customers. An organization that is customer centric will continue to provide its customers will high quality experiences over long period of time. The quality experience is provided on all access points of the customers. This includes the service programs, marketing, sales, and every part of the organization.
The first step of customer centric marketing is to develop an understanding of the customers. This involves research and intelligence. Organizations have to understand their customer base and be aware of who their customers are. From this knowledge, the organization will understand how to identify, group and segment the customers. Organizations can seeks more information about their customer base by understanding how chances or ways in which they likely to behavior. However, understanding individual behavior of a customer for large organization seems almost impossible. The best approach used in such instances is categorizing customers base and further customize the grouping by basing them on information about individual customers.
Customer centric marketing takes a different approach since instead of pushing products and services to customers it seeks to first understand what the customers want. This move is normally considered as a pull of customers towards products and services that satisfy their needs. Therefore, the marketing department of organizations is expected to have the knowledge of what their customers want before engaging in any marketing activity for their products.
Research and intelligence activities about customers, should therefore enable marketers to segment their customer base and make accurate focuses about the segments. It also enables the marketers to make proper adjustments about the development of their products and services so as to have the right product mix used for the right customer segment and at the right time.
Another major aim of customer centric marketing is to seek to satisfy the customers. Satisfaction has to do with customer fulfillment. Basically this is the measure for an organizational performance. Positive fulfillment involves organizations matching up their words with the delivery of product and services. Poor fulfillment would include faults on product and services, and also delays. Poor fulfillment has a negative effect to the organization as it can mean that the customers are highly unlikely to use the products and services of the organization. However, having a customer centric approach, the organization is likely to capture information on how customer fulfillment irrespective on how negative or positive it was. This is because the organization can quickly make an effective response on the nature of customer satisfaction.
Customer centric approach to business processes helps to create an organizational culture since every part of the organization is affected and caused to focus on individual customer satisfaction. The employees with direct customer contact have high responsibilities to deliver both in place of the organization and to the customers. This means that the marketing and sales personnel have the most central role to play in customer centric approach to business processes.
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