- Customer Centricity and the Role of IT
29 Sep 08 | Single Topic Reports
There is a general trend that we have observed in business organizations of every type: they are becoming more ‘customer-centric’ – that is, providing their customers with a higher-quality, more personalized and integrated experience, particularly over the Internet. Generally speaking, customer centricity means moving away from the traditional, inside-out, ‘we know best’ orientation of most companies, and towards an outside-in perspective in which the customer is placed at the centre of the relationship, and the supplier’s organization boundaries are largely transparent. Customer-centric firms also recognize that customers live in a wider business ecosystem, where communities, aggregators and other actors play an increasingly important role.
We usually find that IT needs to change to support changes in the business and its organization. But in this case the reverse also appears to be true. When a company begins to do substantial business over the web, customer centricity often becomes an imperative and begins to drive larger cultural and organizational change within the firm.
Achieving true customer centricity requires a number of specific organizational goals, actions and skills that few firms or their IT departments have fully in place today. Technology is blurring the lines between the Marketing and IT functions, as companies and their staff require a double-deep mix of skills that leverages the marketing potential of the web, but also meets the complex information management needs of the enterprise. While historically corporate Marketing and IT often had a distant and not particularly warm relationship, now increasingly they need to function as one effective team. The CIO often faces the choice of aggressively seeking to build this new partnership, or of watching Enterprise IT get passed over in favour of other alternatives.
- Customer Service Strategies and the Role of IT
31 Jul 09 | Single Topic Reports
IT services are a key route to adding business value and resilience in a recession. Essentially, our research shows firms are becoming more specialised or more integrated so as to create better experiences for their customers. They are moving rapidly into new, innovative services and organisation models are becoming more complex as firms seek to address a multitude of new markets at various stages of development.
Enterprise IT is well positioned to play a major role in services because services generally require a closer cooperation between the business unit and IT than is often the case in products. But to seize this growing role, IT must become much more aware of the business design issues that make all the difference in determining the profitability or ‘stickiness’ of a customer service offering.
This report can help you and your colleagues understand the value that IT can offer in creating attractive business services to better serve your customers and provides key case studies of how certain organisations are already succeeding in this area. The report will appeal not only to CIOs but also any business leader interested in product marketing, innovation and business strategy.
Further information
If you would like to understand this topic further and its implications for your organisation, contact your Account Representative.
- Customer Centricity, the Marketing Function, and the Role of IT
30 Sep 08 | Presentation
Whatever homilies one hears about the importance of the customer, few firms are really customer centric today, not really concerned about the quality of the customer’s experience. But now a much more tech-facile and demanding customer is changing this situation. Ever more facile with Web 2.0 and other advanced technologies, customers are forcing their suppliers to raise their game, especially regarding the quality of the experience offered over the Internet channel.
In this web conference, Kirt Mead outlines some of the innovative approaches leading firms are using to build successful relationships with the new customer and re-invent the marketing function for a technology age.
See event: Customer Centricity, the Marketing Function, and the Role of IT (30 September 2008)
To view the recording for this web conference, please click on 'View Recording' link below:
View Recording
- Customer Centricity
30 Jun 08 | Presentation
In this project - Customer Centricity, the Marketing Function, and the Role of IT - we have tried to identify the forces driving firms towards greater customer centricity and the role that Enterprise IT might play in this exciting new development.
While we are still compiling and analyzing the results of our interviews and other inputs, we can already identify some of the main results of the research. These results are all based on the cases researched through the interviews. Along with further analysis, these cases will form the body of the final report, which is now in preparation. They will also constitute the core of the results to be presented at this workshop.
See event: Customer Centricity (30 June 2008)