Daily Archives: February 5, 2012

Articles, Opinion

Customer centricity

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Based on the article of Shah et al “The path to customer centricity”, I found this really interesting video of Ranjay Gulati, professor of Harvard Business School and author of “Reorganize for Resilience: Putting Customers at the Center of Your Business“. In this video he discusses on some points of customer centricity mentioning that you need to identify your customers and the issues that they have to deal with, in order for your business to be regarded as customer centric. He explains that what you are supposed to care mostly is to solve your customers’ problems.

He also mentions that you are not considered customer centered if you look at your customers just through the lens of your products!

Last but not least, he suggests that you should align yourself in a fundamental way around customers’ problems trying to address those problems!

I hope you will find it interesting!

Enjoy..

Fay Panagopoulou

Articles, Business Case

How a company can be at the top ?

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Inspired by Harrah’s case I realized that what makes leader companies to be at the top except of the products quality is customer satisfaction. Sometimes satisfaction may be more important than product’s quality. Employees should also be satisfied in order to attribute in their best way. If employees and customers are satisfied then this will reflect to company’s outcomes as well.  That is the reason that some companies stand out while others don’t. The combination of quality and satisfaction can be highly promising for a company’s future…

News

Social Media & Higher Education

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I’ve found this pretty interesting infographic about Social Media use within higher education on openuniveristies.com‘s blog. As known, schools aren’t that much in touch with emerging technologies and trends. But the infographic below shows us that these organizations are catching up with regard to Social Media usage. Since their students are well represented wihin Social Media, this might, and probably is, a good progression. How do you guys think our own university is doing with the usage of Social Media?

xo

Ivan

[see the infographic below]

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Articles, Opinion, Videos

Experience Economy

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The experience economy actually consists of companies that provide and sell experiences to their customers. But, what are these experiences?

Let us first start with some theory which Pine and Gilmore discuss in their 1998 article “Welcome to the experience economy.” There are couple of things we think are most interesting from the article, the first one being one sentence which describes the economic value of an experience;

Commodities are fungible, goods tangible, services intangible and experiences are memorable.

Meaning that an experience occurs, and we’re quoting the article now, when a company intentionally uses services as the stage, and goods as props to engage individual customers in a way that creates a memorable event.

Furthermore the article discusses two main dimension experiences have. The first one being customer participation, from passive to active. The other one is connection with the experience. From absorption to immersion. Take a look at the graph.

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Articles, Business Case

Demand-driven supply chains: Jeans VS. Electronics

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During the presentation two articles were discussed. The first one was ‘Customizing Customization‘ and the second article was named ‘Models for Supply Chains in E-Business‘. In this post we will discuss the examples we used to support the theory from the lecture and articles.

Customizing Customization                                                                                             This article describes different company strategies from aggregation to individualization. Instead of choosing one of these extremes, most companies shift towards the middle.   We used two jeans companies as examples of different types of customization strategies.

MakeYourOwnJeans

This company offers you the opportunity to ‘design’ your own jeans online. There is also an option to clone jeans that you already posses. Next to jeans you can also design pants, shirts,  shorts, jackets, coats and suits. Online you can choose from different types of fabrics, colors and fits. The next step is to fill in your measurements, on the website their are guidelines how to measure. The products are produced in India and shipped throughout the world.  The strategy this company follows can be considered as Tailored Customization.

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