Customer Focus

Customer-focused strategies are typically characterized by aspirations of long term relationships – ones that are based on high levels of customer satisfaction and responsiveness. To be effective, however, these strategies must optimize value for both customers and shareholders. The complication: organizations typically lack the capabilities to manage this "tradeoff" between customer and shareholder value.

The capabilities that provide the means to manage this tradeoff are some of the same ones enabling "Dynamic Planning." In addition to these, we help to establish:

• Budgets and KPI targets that are explicitly linked to customer experiences organizations seek to create
• A single view of the customer by consolidating fragmented information from across organizations
• Measurements of activity-based customer profitability (ABCP)
• Measurements of customer risk which combines ABCP with customer loyalty indexes
• Effective internal customer and supplier relationships to institutionalize how tradeoffs are managed
• The ability to cope with rapid product and organization changes to support basic trending analysis

For global companies that manage customer relationships across legal entities and geographies, these capabilities are even more important. This issue is explored further in the "Global Complexity" challenge.