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Manufacturing Technology Committee
Chandler, Arizona Facility

The Customer-Centric Company

Bulking up at the digital customer interface and creating "sticky" relationships with customers are key to e-business success

Structure of Commerce

• Customers have more choice and wield greater power in the digital age
• Purchasing aggregation is common at all levels from individuals to SMBs to kieretsu of large giants
• The greatest portion of value is gained by those who build an [audience, community, market] and then aggregate a set of solutions to sell to it
• Customer knowledge and mindshare are key metrics of business value
• Owning strategic customer interfaces (portals, gizmos, user interfaces, etc.) is a major, sustainable source of competitive advantage
  • Entire value chains become organized around strategic customer interfaces
• Horizontal, large scale service providers handle routine operations tasks
• Direct, one-to-one relationships between companies still dominate commerce; even when market hubs are the platform for commerce, trading partners enjoy customized policies and streamlined procedures

Business Architecture

• Companies everywhere focus on a multitude of new customer interfaces
  • Web-based CRM and tight process linkage (extranets and BPO arrangements)
  • Web-based multi-level multimedia collaboration and highly personalized and localized interfaces for commerce interactions
  • Smart connected products and service platforms that relay constant telemetry on product/service quality, usage, volumes
  • Brand is key; marketing expenses are high
• Even when working through channels, a firm directly touches end customers via Web
  • For many companies, these reach through, transparent channels mean many orders of magnitude increase in the number of customers they can/must interact with
• Companies shift back office activities to outside service providers
• Winning companies are those that focus on making their customers successful e?businesses
  • They extend web-based service platforms to under-served markets, typically SMEs
• Product businesses turn into service businesses with a heavy emphasis on turnkey solutions to critical business needs
• Metrics focus on insuring total commitment to customer service and satisfaction

Enablers

• Service management and SLAs widely implemented for web-based business services
• Converged, digital communications enriches distributed collaboration and improves productivity of managing contacts
• Capturing customer data at every interface and getting a single view of the customer relationship is critical: integrated CRM is very successful
• Companies must build an integrated interface for the customer which requires a great deal of structural change behind the interface
  • Can not do just veneer webification of what you've got-you must get rid of stovepipes and fragmented interfaces
• Connected smart product technology develops quickly and broadly
• CRM service providers extend sophisticated customer management to SMEs