Delivering exceptional customer experiences across the entire channel
Being customer focused in any large organization is difficult, but is complicated even further when you’re striving to deliver a consistent, positive experience through hundreds of channel partners. How do you ensure that every customer receives an exceptional customer experience? Watch this video to learn about Walker’s perspective on customer-focused channels.
How does customer listening work when you're dealing with supply chain relationships?
In many industries, garnering the voice of the customer is more difficult when there is not regular interaction with them. This is the case in supply chains, where your company may be working with channel partners or distributors who are the primary point of contact with customers. In these situations, there’s a variety of relationships and an added layer of complexity in understanding your customers.
In my last post I made the case for a new "dominant logic" or orienting philosophy that companies should embrace called service-dominant logic. There are a lot of important elements to this logic, so it's difficult to distill it into one over-arching statement. I attempt to explain the core of service-dominant logic as this: A shift from viewing market exchanges as occurring between parties with independent control over specific aspects of the exchange (production, selling, consumption, etc.) to viewing exchanges as interactions between networks of partners (including the customer) who are jointly responsible for producing a valuable offering.
"There is only one valid definition of business purpose: to create a customer." - Peter Drucker (1954)
"The aim of marketing is to know and understand the customer so well that the product or service fits her and sells itself." - Peter Drucker (1973)
These two quotes are foundational to many people's view of business and marketing, mine included, but even Drucker himself observed in 2003 - a few years before his death - that most companies do not put these beliefs into action.
