Customer Orientation in Detail
The structure of customer orientation is divided into two levels, the information and the customer level.
Information level:
Companies that work in a customer-oriented manner collect comprehensive information about buyers. The following questions serve to help get this:
- What do you know about the customers?
- What information is collected?
- How can the lessons learned be translated into product and service solutions?
At the information level, internal processes are also examined:
- How is the collected information internally stored?
- How convenient is this data-gathering solution for employees?
- Does every employee have access to the information?
This shows how fundamental interaction between individual divisions such as Marketing, Production, and Sales really is. Only if all the departments are interlinked can the company as a whole build up a successful customer orientation.
Customer level:
At the customer level, all the factors which play a role from the customer’s point of view are decisive for the customer orientation of a company. These factors include, for example:
- Product quality
- Quality of service
- Flexibility in delivery of service
- Qualification of sellers
- Reliability and friendliness of the workforce
This all-round package must be authentically lived by a company in order for a customer to feel connected to it.