Customer Centricity Challenges and Solutions

The assignment explores the challenges of shifting from a product-centric approach to a customer-centric one, particularly in organizations with functionally fragmented structures. It highlights the importance of realigning organizational structures to support customer-centricity and discusses the need for coordination within the firm and the supply chain. The document provides references to relevant literature and research on customer centricity, including its impact on financial performance and customer loyalty.

Running head: E- BUSINESS
E- Business
Name of the Student:
Name of the University:
Author Note:

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Table of Contents
Introduction......................................................................................................................................2
Critical Analysis of Customer Centricity in the Context of E-business..........................................2
Conclusion.......................................................................................................................................6
References........................................................................................................................................9

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Introduction
The article aims at providing an overview of the validity of the concept of customer
centricity in the context of the E business. Customer centricity represents the approach for doing
business and focuses on ensuring a constructive customer experience for driving profit and
gaining competitive advantage. The report also puts forward a critical analysis of customer
centricity based on three peer-reviewed articles.
Critical Analysis of Customer Centricity in the Context of E-business
According to Shah et al (2014), customer centricity and its benefits is discussed for over a
decade now although there are still many firms who struggles in completely aligning them to
paradigm of customer-centricity. Here the author tries to identify the challenges and the
fundamental issues that deter the firm from being customer centric. However, the challenges
relates to the structure, process, financial metrics and the organizational culture of the firm. To
overcome such barriers, the customer centricity is driven by organization realignment and strong
leadership commitment.
The customers represent the people who help in determining the business along with
determining its produce and prosperity. Therefore most business, including the E-Business
should focus more on fulfilling the customer needs rather than selling products. However, the
importance of the customer centricity embraced and recognized by the businesses (Galliers and
Leidner 2014). Five trends reinforce the need for the businesses to undergo transformation. This
includes:

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a. Intensification of pressure for improving productivity of marketing
b. Enhancing the diversity of the market
c. Intensification of competition amongst the companies
d. Well informed and demanding consumers and customers
e. Accelerating the advances of the technology
The prevalence of such an ambience have compelled the companies including the E-
business in realizing that the approach of customer centricity ensures providing one of the best
means for developing profitable and close relationships with the customers (Bedarkar, Pandita,
Agarwal and Saini 2016). However, there exist innumerable companies that are still hopes for
acquiring customer centricity.
However, with emergence of information technology in the second half of 20th century,
there was massive development in collecting, storing, transmission and analysis of huge amount
of information. It was now that the firms realized the opportunity of investing in IT for
management of customer relationships. Companies started adopting technology driven marketing
that allowed the companies with an opportunity of achieving a continuous dialogue across all the
cross points of the customers along with the facilities of personalized treatment for the valuable
customers (Galliers and Leidner 2014). However, in reality most of the companies lack the
necessary customer centricity for realizing its benefits.
The culture has many facets and levels that make them resistant to changes. However, the
values likes at the deepest level for expressing the enduring preferences. The organizations
focusing on the aspect of customer centricity are bound by a central idea that each of the decision

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begins with the anticipated customer opportunities meant for their advantage. The further
available level for a culture is represented by norm that refers to the shared beliefs about
expected or appropriate behavior. Hence, there exists a general norm within the customer-centric
organization is the fact that the employees represent the customer advocates. Another norm
exists in the form of the willingness of the employees in sharing information with their
counterparts so that the business is able to achieve a better position for meeting the customer
needs. Hence, increasing number of businesses including E-business must adopt a customer
centric paradigm for attaining success.
In contrast to this, according to Lamberti (2013), the implementation of customer
centricity represents a process through which organizational behavioral dynamics, inter
departmental dynamics and inter –firm dynamics are stressed. In addition, he also observed that
customer centricity is not suitable for every company since several necessary conditions for
implementation if customer centricities are exogenous variables partly. However, amongst the
newly evolved marketing concepts of the last couple of year, customer centricity represents the
most debated. Companies like IBM, Best Buy and Jet Blue Airways have identified customer
centricity as the core of the pursuit in gaining competitive advantage. Thus, customer centricity
represents a situation experienced by marketing concept.
The literature related to customer centricity fell short in analyzing comprehensively in
analyzing the conditions that favors implementation of the customer centricity. There was
however two contributions detected in this area that represented analyzing the structural and
environmental factors that helped in raising the need for the companies in moving towards
customer centric approach (Richardson, James and Kelley 2015). According to the author, there
existed two basic uncovered issues of customer centricity. Firstly, this included the dealings of

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customer centricity dealt wit and the differences from other marketing theories. Secondly, what
the characteristics of firm are that hindered/favoured adoption of customer centric configuration.
Recently, there have been criticisms about the sustainability of the emergence of a customer
centric that determines that customer centricity remains balanced by resource focus and is
economically effective.
The meaning put forward by the concept of customer centricity in various interviews
ensures an operational view of the constituting elements thereby suggesting the manifestations of
customer centric business including E business (Mohapatra 2013). This involved:
(a) Constant interaction of the customers focused at generating the intelligence of the
explicit and hidden needs customers
(b) Systematic involvement of the customers in the process of decision making of new
product development and marketing
(c) Ensures strongly coordinated structures of the organization, sharing and gathering of
information about customers and responsively managing interface of all touch points
(d) Presence of the supply chain coordinated with the firms that can face customization as
per the requirements of the customers.
The customer centricity goes beyond and encompasses idea of the market related to
‘Customer orientation’ thus affirming the necessity of customer integration that is actually the
shift from understanding customer wants and thereby translating them into most suitable
products.
Again, according to Bonacchi (2013), successful customer centric organization realigns
the organizational structure. However, the first logical state for this type of organizational
realignment represents appearance of the coordinating activities, which aims at overcoming the

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customary deficiency of the structures that are product centric. Here according to the author, the
focus of the organizations are gradually shifting from the product centric approach towards a
customer centricity. The change the product centricity to the customer centric direction requires
shifting towards the strategy of orientation of the interaction, an approach towards marketing that
aggressively relies on the customer value management and response capacity of interaction. The
challenge of making a shift from the product centric approach to the customer centric approach is
evident about the changes taking place in structures of the organization. A company that is
typically product centric and remains organized by the functional methods defined by the types
of products is usually not favorable to the customer centric approach (West, Ford and Ibrahim
2015). This is because; in the product centric approach the sales manager ends up pushing the
different offerings of the product to the specific customer without determining whether his needs
are true. However, a perfect customer centric organization have all the functional activities
aligned and integrated for delivering a superior value to the customers. Thus, tailoring the
solution according to the changing customer demand requires the adoption of the newer culture
for collaborating with the financial and marketing management functions (Loshin and Reifer,
2013). However, in presence of an approach that is functionally fragmented, organizations faced
threat in relation to the position of the market and the credible marketing function of the firms.
Although marketers possess better knowledge on the computation of the metric in relation to the
customer, they however take no notice of the complexities of embedding the metrics into the
financial management system of the firm.
Conclusion
The article ends by providing an insight that according to some author customer
centricity proved to be an indefinable goal for most organizations. These results from the failure

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in understanding and addressing one of more of the issues and challenges existing at
organizational level addressed in the report. More or less businesses have managed to traverse
the path towards customer centricity thereby forming superior financial performance and the
loyal customers. However, some of the authors are of the view that customer centricity requires
the necessary attention along all customer touch points of any business that necessitates
coordination both within the firm and the entire supply chain. Nonetheless, some authors
however consider that customer centric organizations should realign their organizational
structure. Thus, customer centricity has become a necessary condition for all firms of the 21st
century and E-business stands as no exception.

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References
Bedarkar, M., Pandita, D., Agarwal, R. and Saini, R., 2016. Examining the impact of
organizational culture on customer centricity in organizations: An analysis. Prabandhan: Indian
Journal of Management, 9(2), pp.19-28.
Bonacchi, M. and Perego, P., 2013. Improving profitability with customer‐centric strategies: the
case of a mobile content provider. Strategic Change, 20(7‐8), pp.253-267.
Galliers, R.D. and Leidner, D.E. eds., 2014. Strategic information management: challenges and
strategies in managing information systems. Routledge.
Kilara, T. and Rhyne, E., 2014. Customer-Centricity for Financial Inclusion.
Lamberti, L., 2013. Customer centricity: the construct and the operational antecedents. Journal
of Strategic marketing, 21(7), pp.588-612.
Loshin, D. and Reifer, A., 2013. Using information to develop a culture of customer centricity:
customer centricity, analytics, and information utilization. Elsevier.
Mohapatra, S., 2013. E-commerce Strategy. In E-Commerce Strategy (pp. 155-171). Springer,
Boston, MA.
Richardson, N., James, J. and Kelley, N., 2015. Customer-centric Marketing: Supporting
Sustainability in the Digital Age. Kogan Page Publishers.
Shah, D., Rust, R.T., Parasuraman, A., Staelin, R. and Day, G.S., 2014. The path to customer
centricity. Journal of service research, 9(2), pp.113-124.

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West, D.C., Ford, J. and Ibrahim, E., 2015. Strategic marketing: creating competitive advantage.
Oxford University Press, USA.