ABSTRACT
From the somewhat acid (though well-deserved) comments about how badly companies treat their customers, in Chapter 2, we established that there is a major imperative for management in all types of organization to focus better on customer needs – to be market-led, to care for the customer, to create the value that matters to the customer, and so on. For example, one report has recently suggested that ‘customer-centric’ companies are 60 per cent more profitable than those who are not, and have lower operating costs[1]. However, what is far less clear is how managers can evaluate and monitor, let alone change, the performance of their organizations, in terms of achieving effective and productive customer focus. That is, even if we agreed on what we should be doing about this issue, there remains the problem of how we can actually do it. The achievement of the much soughtafter customer-focused organization has proved elusive (though not impossible). Two things are clear, however:
Achieving real customer focus normally needs more than management ‘say so’ or edict – however exalted and prestigious the managers in question may be.
