All companies and organisations share a common goal and critical responsibility, namely, customer management. We are dealing with a global market with increasingly better prepared customers and more demanding customers, with new and more complex needs and requirements. Companies and organisations have to be capable of developing at least at the same pace as the market, albeit striving to keep ahead of it.
All companies and organisations try to exploit those competitive advantages that set them apart from their competitors. To do so, they may develop the following lines:
§ The product or service offered
§ The price charged
§ The experience /management of customer relations
Customer-focus, and its management, is emerging as a critical strategy because relations constitute an essential skill for achieving sustained competitiveness.
In competitive markets in which customers have the opportunity to choose between similar products and prices, 70% of the decisions customers make are based on relations management. The competitive differential today is increasingly based on intangibles, such as proximity, trust and the level of service. In short, the key to Differentiation within a highly competitive market like the present one is, without doubt, SUSTAINED PROXIMITY in the relationship with customers. The key lies in the realm of SERVICE.
Accordingly, the Excellent Enterprise has to pursue its management in a way that provides it with detailed knowledge on needs and allows it to respond appropriately. This involves not only “intermediate and regular customers”, which in many cases means their distributors, but also “end customers”, the users with whom they have to conjure up some way of achieving that Sustained Proximity, that NEW LEVEL OF SERVICE, which will provide the key to differentiation and competitiveness.
What is a customer-focused company for LKS? Customer-focus is a strategy designed to provide value on a sustained basis to both customers (intermediate and end) and the company itself through management excellence in customer relations and based on technological solutions that are specifically focused on customers, helping to further knowledge on them. The alignment of Technology with Strategy, as well as with Organisation and Business Processes, together with effective Change Management are key elements for the success of a project in Customer-focus.
Our Integrated Customer-focus Solution allows for the significant development of the following areas:
§ Develop and manage the appropriate knowledge for attaining a comprehensive vision of Customers and Competitors with a view to adapting the organisation’s strategy to possible market variations, improving the company’s competitive position. This 360° knowledge should be shared internally by the entire organisation with regard to customers.
§ Maximise the value of each contact with customers. Undertake more agile and value-laden contacts. Achieve a greater and swifter detection of business opportunities in order to pre-empt with “upstream” solutions.
Our solutions encompass, amongst others, the following process and functional spheres:
§ Marketing: Support for the organisation’s marketing processes through the planning and deployment of different marketing plans and campaigns in terms of both communication/mailing and actions and management of the budget allocated accordingly.
§ Customer Awareness: This involves deploying a relational strategy of proximity to customers based on information on them that is personalised, updated and available throughout the organisation, with this knowledge constituting a strategic asset and mainstay for any loyalty programme.
§ Sales Force: It underscores the critical processes in customer relations within the commercial sphere throughout the tender-order process. It considers the solutions designed to define the sales catalogues by taking into account the different prices and markets applicable to the customer portfolio. Furthermore, it allows for the preparation of commercial tenders in terms of a rule-based advanced product configurator designed to maximise value for customers and the profitability of the commercial business, whilst featuring a large part of the organisation’s knowledge regarding its product range and competitive strategy.
§ Service: It provides after-sales support for customer relations guaranteeing the appropriate levels of quality in service and in response to incidents in accordance with the type of contract arranged with each customer. It provides indicators and the detection of new opportunities on the basis of sustained proximity with customers and a service that is supervised at all times. It is another source that feeds customer awareness with critical information in terms of satisfaction in many cases.