ABSTRACT
This chapter investigates the reasons for the gap between realization of converting customer strategy to culture and delivering against it to create a customer-oriented culture. Organizations such as Virgin, Nike, and the US retailer Nordstrom, have succeeded in creating strong brands with powerful brand promises. Through listening to customer needs and via consultation with employees, they have been able to identify brand values which form the backbone of how they do business with the customer and how employees are managed – in short they create a customer-focus culture that realizes the customer vision. One of the trends over years has been to believe that the implementation of a customer relationship management (CRM) system will deliver the corporate vision in relation to building a customer culture. Fundamentally, CRM is a software package that will manipulate data to provide one view of the customer and further guidance on how to: segment the customers, target the customers and so on.
