Category: When Customers Rule!

Creating a buzz – customer centric or gimmick?

Bengaluru (or Bangalore) has witnessed an explosion in property rates over the last few years. The city has been the nerve center of the Indian IT boom. Instances of land rates increasing by 10-15 times in 2-3 years is normal. This growth has created millionaires of people …none more in numbers than real estate developers.

But as in the rest of the world, real estate developers are most opportunistic too. Never loosing a chance to make more money, they have the dubious distinction of being difficult to handle, not serious about any deadlines & being short sighted.

There are exceptions of course.

One of my friends recently told me about Shriram Properties (a real estate developer) who just returned back 1.5% of the initially charged (collected about 3 years ago) amount for a flat. Reasons quoted – they had overestimated on a few accounts. Obviously this friend of mine was thrilled. Not only that, he was telling me & anybody else who would listen to him that day. And now here I am blogging about it.

Customer centric or marketing gimmick? Either ways, the act has created a lot of good will. Created quite a bit of buzz in the marketplace. And has a lot more prospective buyers than they would’ve had without this act.
  • Explore more & more ways of benefiting your customers. It will pay back.
  • Every real estate developer’s web site has space dedicated to how customer centric they are. But action speaks louder than words – DO something.
  • The more notorious your industry, the better the chances of customer centricity helping you differentiate yourself.

I also found another post on a similar topic – customer centricity amongst US commercial real estate companies: http://cpnmhn.typepad.com/management_matters/2007/12/are-you-custome.html.

Highway to Customer Alignment

Becoming more customer-centric has moved from the “whether” column to the “when” column.

# I really wish this was true all over. Most companies & executives have read / heard about the need to be customer centric – they may concur too – but most, I believe, are waiting for some external event to nudge them into action & necessary investment (time, effort & focus).
As pointed out in the article, smart companies ought not to wait. Instead they have to the take the initiatives to changes themselves if they intend to be ahead.

The author identifies six critical parameters that determine the degree of customer alignment for most companies. These six factors provide a good starting point for honest inquiry:

  • Customer relationships – management’s level of customer contact & empowerment of contact personnel to deal with customers
  • Strategy – They’re directional, not operational.
  • Marketing
  • Sales and service
  • Process design
  • Capacity to change – Most customer aligned companies endured some measure of organizational upheaval—often considerable upheaval to become customer aligned.

The author also lists questions that need to be asked for each of these areas to ascertain how aligned you are. Just asking these questions will help point companies wanting to “hit the road” and head down the right path towards customer-alignment.

http://pro20.sgizmo.com/survey.php?SURVEY=JDNA28Q94B6C00UQ173A0S8GS9OR3C-14130-2914627&pswsgt=1192125395

# As with most surveys, rather than the result & the evaluation of the results, the process of going through the questions provide more value. They are pointers to the rights & wrongs in becoming customer aligned.

Jack Welch on Customer Loyalty

Inspiration for this post –
Customer Loyalty’s New Rules – BW Podcast – The Welch Way

Some of Jack Welch’s insights from this conversation on the topic –
  • Rules of customer loyalty has changed – there is a paradigm shift

  • Its moving beyond cost, quality & service (the traditional value engines) – which are nice, but is assumed to be a given now & not sufficient for building loyalty

  • Welch suggests – earn loyalty by making yourself indispensible at an intellectual level

  • Its all about your customers winning. To earn loyalty, a supplier should think about ways to provide customers a competitive advantage that no one else can

  • It requires a different mindset – always thinking about how you can make your customers more competitive in their markets, ways to make them win, etc.

  • Its all about getting into an intense partnership with your customers ..if you don’t, someone else will.