The Validity Of Customer Centricity In E-business: A Critical Analysis

Benefits of Customer Centricity

Discuss about the Profitability With Customer Strategy Of E-Business.

The article aims at providing an overview of the validity of the concept of customer centricity in the context of the E business. Customer centricity represents the approach for doing business and focuses on ensuring a constructive customer experience for driving profit and gaining competitive advantage. The report also puts forward a critical analysis of customer centricity based on three peer-reviewed articles.

According to Shah et al (2014), customer centricity and its benefits is discussed for over a decade now although there are still many firms who struggles in completely aligning them to paradigm of customer-centricity. Here the author tries to identify the challenges and the fundamental issues that deter the firm from being customer centric. However, the challenges relates to the structure, process, financial metrics and the organizational culture of the firm. To overcome such barriers, the customer centricity is driven by organization realignment and strong leadership commitment.

The customers represent the people who help in determining the business along with determining its produce and prosperity. Therefore most business, including the E-Business should focus more on fulfilling the customer needs rather than selling products. However, the importance of the customer centricity embraced and recognized by the businesses (Galliers and Leidner 2014). Five trends reinforce the need for the businesses to undergo transformation. This includes:

1. Intensification of pressure for improving productivity of marketing
2. Enhancing the diversity of the market
3. Intensification of competition amongst the companies
4. Well informed and demanding consumers and customers
5. Accelerating the advances of the technology

The prevalence of such an ambience have compelled the companies including the E-business in realizing that the approach of customer centricity ensures providing one of the best means for developing profitable and close relationships with the customers (Bedarkar, Pandita, Agarwal and Saini 2016). However, there exist innumerable companies that are still hopes for acquiring customer centricity.

However, with emergence of information technology in the second half of 20^th century, there was massive development in collecting, storing, transmission and analysis of huge amount of information. It was now that the firms realized the opportunity of investing in IT for management of customer relationships. Companies started adopting technology driven marketing that allowed the companies with an opportunity of achieving a continuous dialogue across all the cross points of the customers along with the facilities of personalized treatment for the valuable customers (Galliers and Leidner 2014). However, in reality most of the companies lack the necessary customer centricity for realizing its benefits.

The culture has many facets and levels that make them resistant to changes. However, the values likes at the deepest level for expressing the enduring preferences. The organizations focusing on the aspect of customer centricity are bound by a central idea that each of the decision begins with the anticipated customer opportunities meant for their advantage. The further available level for a culture is represented by norm that refers to the shared beliefs about expected or appropriate behavior. Hence, there exists a general norm within the customer-centric organization is the fact that the employees represent the customer advocates. Another norm exists in the form of the willingness of the employees in sharing information with their counterparts so that the business is able to achieve a better position for meeting the customer needs. Hence, increasing number of businesses including E-business must adopt a customer centric paradigm for attaining success.

Identifying Challenges of Customer Centricity Implementation

In contrast to this, according to Lamberti (2013), the implementation of customer centricity represents a process through which  organizational behavioral dynamics, inter departmental dynamics and inter –firm dynamics are stressed. In addition, he also observed that customer centricity is not suitable for every company since several necessary conditions for implementation if customer centricities are exogenous variables partly. However, amongst the newly evolved marketing concepts of the last couple of year, customer centricity represents the most debated. Companies like IBM, Best Buy and Jet Blue Airways have identified customer centricity as the core of the pursuit in gaining competitive advantage. Thus, customer centricity represents a situation experienced by marketing concept.

The literature related to customer centricity fell short in analyzing comprehensively in analyzing the conditions that favors implementation of the customer centricity. There was however two contributions detected in this area that represented analyzing the structural and environmental factors that helped in raising the need for the companies in moving towards customer centric approach (Richardson, James and Kelley 2015). According to the author, there existed two basic uncovered issues of customer centricity. Firstly, this included the dealings of customer centricity dealt wit and the differences from other marketing theories. Secondly, what the characteristics of firm are that hindered/favoured adoption of customer centric configuration. Recently, there have been criticisms about the sustainability of the emergence of a customer centric that determines that customer centricity remains balanced by resource focus and is economically effective.

The meaning put forward by the concept of customer centricity in various interviews ensures an operational view of the constituting elements thereby suggesting the manifestations of customer centric business including E business (Mohapatra 2013). This involved:

(a) Constant interaction of the customers focused at generating the intelligence of  the explicit and hidden needs customers

(b) Systematic involvement of the customers in the process of decision making of new product development and marketing

 (c) Ensures strongly coordinated structures of the organization, sharing and gathering of information about customers and responsively managing interface of all touch points

(d) Presence of the supply chain coordinated with the firms that can face customization as per the requirements of the customers.

The customer centricity goes beyond and encompasses idea of the market related to ‘Customer orientation’ thus affirming the necessity of customer integration that is actually the shift from understanding customer wants and thereby translating them into most suitable products.

Again, according to Bonacchi (2013), successful customer centric organization realigns the organizational structure. However, the first logical state for this type of organizational realignment represents appearance of the coordinating activities, which aims at overcoming the customary deficiency of the structures that are product centric. Here according to the author, the focus of the organizations are gradually shifting from the product centric approach towards a customer centricity. The change the product centricity to the customer centric direction requires shifting towards the strategy of orientation of the interaction, an approach towards marketing that aggressively relies on the customer value management and response capacity of interaction. The challenge of making a shift from the product centric approach to the customer centric approach is evident about the changes taking place in structures of the organization. A company that is typically product centric and remains organized by the functional methods defined by the types of products is usually not favorable to the customer centric approach (West, Ford and Ibrahim 2015). This is because; in the product centric approach the sales manager ends up pushing the different offerings of the product to the specific customer without determining whether his needs are true. However, a perfect customer centric organization have all the functional activities aligned and integrated for delivering a superior value to the customers. Thus, tailoring the solution according to the changing customer demand requires the adoption of the newer culture for collaborating with the financial and marketing management functions (Loshin and Reifer, 2013). However, in presence of an approach that is functionally fragmented, organizations faced threat in relation to the position of the market and the credible marketing function of the firms. Although marketers possess better knowledge on the computation of the metric in relation to the customer, they however take no notice of the complexities of embedding the metrics into the financial management system of the firm.

Conclusion

The article ends by providing an insight that according to some author customer centricity proved to be an indefinable goal for most organizations. These results from the failure in understanding and addressing one of more of the issues and challenges existing at organizational level addressed in the report. More or less businesses have managed to traverse the path towards customer centricity thereby forming superior financial performance and the loyal customers. However, some of the authors are of the view that customer centricity requires the necessary attention along all customer touch points of any business that necessitates coordination both within the firm and the entire supply chain. Nonetheless, some authors however consider that customer centric organizations should realign their organizational structure. Thus, customer centricity has become a necessary condition for all firms of the 21st century and E-business stands as no exception.

References

Bedarkar, M., Pandita, D., Agarwal, R. and Saini, R., 2016. Examining the impact of organizational culture on customer centricity in organizations: An analysis. Prabandhan: Indian Journal of Management, 9(2), pp.19-28.

Bonacchi, M. and Perego, P., 2013. Improving profitability with customer?centric strategies: the case of a mobile content provider. Strategic Change, 20(7?8), pp.253-267.

Galliers, R.D. and Leidner, D.E. eds., 2014. Strategic information management: challenges and strategies in managing information systems. Routledge.

Kilara, T. and Rhyne, E., 2014. Customer-Centricity for Financial Inclusion.

Lamberti, L., 2013. Customer centricity: the construct and the operational antecedents. Journal of Strategic marketing, 21(7), pp.588-612.

Loshin, D. and Reifer, A., 2013. Using information to develop a culture of customer centricity: customer centricity, analytics, and information utilization. Elsevier.

Mohapatra, S., 2013. E-commerce Strategy. In E-Commerce Strategy (pp. 155-171). Springer, Boston, MA.

Richardson, N., James, J. and Kelley, N., 2015. Customer-centric Marketing: Supporting Sustainability in the Digital Age. Kogan Page Publishers.

Shah, D., Rust, R.T., Parasuraman, A., Staelin, R. and Day, G.S., 2014. The path to customer centricity. Journal of service research, 9(2), pp.113-124.

West, D.C., Ford, J. and Ibrahim, E., 2015. Strategic marketing: creating competitive advantage. Oxford University Press, USA.